GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE SNOWBALLS, POPULATIONS, AND MODELS

Gravitational waves represent an incredibly exciting new frontier in observational astronomy. The rapidly growing data set of mergers of black holes and neutron stars contains information on the compact-object masses, spins, and merger redshifts. The population of these sources has the potential to inform our understanding of fields as broad as stellar and binary evolution, mass-transfer physics, dynamics in dense stellar environments, supernova modeling, nucleosynthesis, chemical evolution, the cosmological history of the Universe, as well as the fundamental theory of gravity. Yet, these discoveries rely on inference using data with limited precision and significant selection effects, using potentially imperfect models that may lead to incorrect conclusions. This workshop brings together researchers at the forefront of both forward astrophysical modeling of compact object binary formation and gravitational-wave data analysis in preparation for the upcoming O4 data release of the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA interferometers.