Katie Breivik

Prof. Katie Breivik is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Talk title: “Binary stars: a decades-old problem with an open-science solution”

Abstract: Binary stars play a role in nearly all areas of astrophysics, yet, comprehensive models which accurately describe all aspects of binary evolution, from birth through to the formation of stellar remnants, remain elusive. This is due, at least in part, to a relative dearth of data sets that provide measurements of binary properties and cover swaths of stellar population parameters like mass and temperature. The development of several astronomical surveys which span both the electromagnetic and gravitational wave spectra, and provide measurements of binary-star parameters, offer a unique opportunity to confront models for binary evolution with data. In this talk I will review how uncertain binary interactions shape stellar populations and discuss recent work which aims to constrain these interactions by comparing the results of binary population synthesis simulations to publically released data.