The recent breakthrough in the detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging black hole (BH) and neutron star (NS) binaries by advanced LIGO/Virgo has generated renewed interest in understanding the formation mechanisms of merging compact binaries, from the evolution of massive stellar binaries and triples in the galactic fields, dynamical interactions in dense star clusters to binary mergers in AGN disks. I will review these different formation channels, and discuss how observations of spin-orbit misalignments, eccentricities, masses and mass ratios in a sample of merging binaries by aLIGO can constrain various formation channels. The important roles of space-borne gravitational wave detectors will also be discussed.

BIO

Dong Lai is Simon Professor of Astrophysics at Cornell University, and T.-D. Lee Professor (visiting) at T.-D. Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 1994, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. He joined the faculty of the Astronomy Department at Cornell in 1997. He has held visiting positions at Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, and several research research intitutues in China (National and Shanghai Astronomical Observatories, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University).

His current research is in theoretical astrophysics, focusing on exoplanets, compact objects (neutron stars, black holes and white dwarfs), and astrophysical (particle and fluid) dynamics in general.