Cosmic collisions - progress and prospects for gravitational-wave astronomy

The observation of mergers of black holes and neutron stars has established gravitational-wave astronomy as a powerful tool to understand the Universe.  After a brief introduction to gravitational waves and how the detectors work, I will discuss the insights that have come from the events identified thus far by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations.

In particular, I will discuss merger rate estimates, what we know about the mass distributions of compact binary systems, and what we have learned from multi-messenger observations of binary mergers.  I will finish with a discussion of future observing runs and what we can expect over the next few years.

Speaker: Patrick Brady, UWM