Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

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 discuss different aspects of the dynamical formation channels (focusing on tertiary-induced mergers and AGN disks), and discuss how observations of spin-orbit misalignments, eccentricities, masses and mass ratios in a sample of merging binaries by aLIGO can constrain these formation channels. I will also discuss some novel three-body dynamical effects related to merging binaries.