Physical Society Colloquium

The Dawn of Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics

Vicky Kalogera

Department of Physics & Astronomy
Northwestern University

The very first observing run of the Advanced LIGO detectors led to the discovery of binary-black-hole inspiral and merger events, and overnight we got launched into the era of gravitational-wave astrophysics. In this talk I will review the key results from the LIGO data search, signal characterization, and measurements of source properties. I will discuss how these observations enable the first tests of general relativity in the strong-field regime and what this discovery implies for black-hole astrophysics.