Gravitational waves

Gravitational waves opened an entirely new way to observe the Universe — not with light, but with ripples in spacetime from merging black holes and neutron stars. It's far from my home turf of stellar spectroscopy, which is exactly why I find it interesting: the statistical problems turn out to be remarkably familiar.

My contributions here are methodological. Inferring the population of merging compact objects from a catalogue of detections is, at its core, a population-inference problem with a strongly distorting selection function — the same class of problem I work on with stars. The data-analysis tools transfer, even when the physics looks completely different.

What draws me in:

• Population inference for compact-object mergers, accounting for detection selection effects.
• Building fast, approximate models where full simulations are too expensive to use at scale.
• Borrowing methods across fields — and finding that good inference machinery rarely cares what kind of object produced the data.

This theme is a good illustration of why I invest so much in general computational data analysis and population inference: the methods travel.