Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

The observation of mergers of black holes and neutron stars has established gravitational-wave astronomy as 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.