Profiling stellar environments of gravitational wave sources

The poor sky localisation and the typical lack of observable electromagnetic (EM) counterparts make it difficult to confidently identify and study the hosts that nurture the formation and evolution of compact binary coalescences (CBCs). In this talk, I will show that detailed information about the host environment (e.g. the mass and steepness of the host potential) can be directly inferred by measuring the kinematic parameters (acceleration and its time-derivatives) of the binary's center of mass using gravitational waves alone, bypassing the need for an EM counterpart. I will consider CBCs in various realistic environments such as globular clusters, nuclear star clusters, and active galactic nuclei disks, to demonstrate how orbit and environment parameters can be extracted for CBCs detectable by ground- and space-based observatories on a single-event basis. These measurements of host stellar environment properties promise to shed light on our understanding of how CBCs form, evolve, and merge.