Gravitational Wave Paleontology: a New Frontier to Probe the Lives of Massive Binary Stars across Cosmic History

The rapidly increasing population of double compact object mergers detected with gravitational waves provides an unprecedented probe of the physics of black holes and neutron stars, and of the evolution of the binary massive stars that formed them. This will open the new frontier of `gravitational-wave paleontology': studying massive stars and binary evolution from their 'remnant' compact object mergers, with the goal of answering some of the biggest open questions in astrophysics today: How do these gravitational-wave sources form? What can we learn from them about the formation, lives, and explosive deaths of massive stars across cosmic time? How do these sources help to enrich the universe with heavy metals? In this thesis/talk, I outline the key bottleneck in gravitational-wave paleontology: the gravitational-wave progenitor Uncertainty Challenge. I will present what it is, and how I aim to quantify and understand the key uncertainties in theoretical models of the formation of gravitational-wave sources focusing on the formation from isolated massive binary stars, with the key goal to use the rapidly growing population of gravitational-wave observations as a new probe of the formation, lives, and deaths of massive binary stars through cosmic history