The Current State of Gravitational Wave Searches with LIGO/VIRGO

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has just started their observing run 3. I will first give an introduction to gravitational wave searches and the events that have been found so far and describe some of the interesting astrophysics problems that might be addressed in the coming few years. Together with the rest of the IAS team, I will then describe the results of the searches for new events in the publicly available LIGO data that we have carried out (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10331.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07214.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10341.pdf). These searches have nearly doubled the catalog of binary black hole mergers.