• The student will be have a working knowledge of the structure and equation of state of compact objects
• The student will master the physics of accretion onto compact objects and be able to relate this to observed phenomena.
• The student will understand the basics of binary evolution and mass transfer
• The student will understand how compact binaries can be observed at all electromagnetic wavelenghts and in gravitational waves
• The student will understand the basic techniques of gravitational wave detection

Gravitational waves (GW) are a new tool to study the universe. Binary stellar systems containing at least one compact object (a white dwarf, neutron star or black hole) are ideal GW sources, but also host most of the observed high energy physics phenomena as observed in the X-ray and gamma-ray sky: X-ray bursts, X-ray pulsars, novae, Supernovae Type Ia, radio and X-ray jets, accretion disks and perhaps even gamma-ray bursts.
The course will give an overview of the formation of the compact binary and their expected populations as GW sources. In turn, the way GW are used to detect these sources with ground-based and with space detectors, and how the detectors work will be studied. This then leads to discussion of how GW, where needed combined with electromagnetic observations, can be used to study astrophysical sources, across the GW spectrum.