MSI Seminar

Latest results from LIGO and Virgo

Jess McIver

UBC

In less than five years, the field of gravitational wave astronomy has grown from a first discovery to building a catalog of dozens of cosmic collisions. Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo’s third observing run, from April 2019 to March 2020, likely added dozens more known compact object mergers to the eleven confident detections LIGO-Virgo reported from the first two Advanced-era observing runs. I'll summarize recent results from LIGO-Virgo and their implications, including the recently announced discovery of a 150 solar mass black hole, and discuss challenges for LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA in this new era of multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves.