New discoveries with gravitational-wave astrophysics

ORAL  · Invited

Abstract

Over the last decade, 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, which has provided new insights into extreme spacetime curvatures, cosmology, and ultra-dense matter as well as the origin of heavy elements. I'll give an overview of the current Advanced LIGO detectors and summarize 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.

*This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Spain. KAGRA is supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan; National Research Foundation (NRF) and Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) in Korea; Academia Sinica (AS) and National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan.

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Publication: First results from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's current observing run (O4) include:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad5beb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16565
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adb3a0

Presenters

  • Jessica McIver

    • University of British Columbia

Authors

  • Jessica McIver

    • University of British Columbia