Implications of gravitational wave detections for stellar astrophysics and feedback
Abstract
Stars with masses much higher than our Sun end their short lives in a gravitational collapse, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes. The detections of gravitational waves (GW) brought massive star astrophysics into the new multi-messenger era. At the same time it exposed the limits of our knowledge about massive stars lives and deaths. When a massive binary evolves, one component will collapse first. If the newly formed compact object remains bound, it may accrete matter lost by its non-degenerate companion and thus power strong X-ray radiation. The resulting high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs) bridge the evolutionary gap between massive stars and GW sources and are important sources of stellar feedback. In this talk I will briefly review what we presently know about massive stars and HMXBs, and highlight the key problems in our current understanding. I will further discuss the role of stellar feedback in low-metallicity galaxies. Finally, I will discuss a unified view on massive stars and stellar feedback within the framework of multi-messenger astrophysics.