What You Don't Know Can Hurt You: Use and Abuse of Astrophysical Models in Gravitational-wave Population Analyses

Understand

One of the goals of gravitational-wave astrophysics is to infer the number and properties of the formation channels of binary black holes (BBHs); to do so, one must be able to connect various models with the data.

• We explore benefits and potential issues with analyses using models informed by population synthesis.
• We consider 5 possible formation channels of BBHs, as in Zevin et al.
• (2021b).