Gravity seminar - Will Farr Seminar

Almost two years ago, the first direct detections of gravitational wave sources were announced. Since autumn 2015 the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and, recently, Virgo, have detected six likely binary black hole mergers and - in August 2017 - a binary neutron star merger. This latter event was also observed in the electromagnetic spectrum, marking the beginning of the era of GW-EM multi messenger astronomy. I will discuss these detections, what we now know from them about the population of merging compact objects and what we can expect to learn from similar detections in the near future.