General Physics Colloquium, Professor Jess McIver, University of British Columbia - Ralls Lecture

Title:  New Discoveries with Gravitational-wave Astrophysics

Host:  Nils Deppe

Abstract:  In the last ten years, the field of gravitational wave astrophysics has grown from a groundbreaking first discovery to revealing new populations of black holes and neutron stars through distant cosmic collisions, yielding new insights into extreme spacetime curvatures, cosmology, and ultra-dense matter. I'll give an overview of the current Advanced LIGO detectors and summarize the most recent results from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network and their wide-reaching implications. I'll close with prospects for the future of multi-messenger astrophysics with gravitational wave detectors on Earth and in space.