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Jess McIver
University of British Columbia

Abstract

In less than five years, the field of gravitational wave astronomy has grown from a ground-breaking first discovery to revealing new populations of stellar remnants through distant cosmic collisions. LIGO-Virgo has now reported 50 known compact object mergers, including the recent first discovery of an intermediate mass black hole. I'll summarize recent results from LIGO-Virgo and their implications, give an overview of the instrumentation of the Advanced LIGO detectors, and discuss challenges for confidently recovering gravitational wave signals from glitchy, unpredictable Advanced LIGO detector data as well as prospects for the future of gravitational wave astrophysics.