Gravitational-Wave Astronomy: Today and Tomorrow
Recent observations of gravitational waves (GWs) have opened up a new branch of astronomy. During their first three observing runs, LIGO and Virgo observed around a hundred compact binary mergers involving black holes and neutron stars. Recently, pulsar timing arrays also obtained evidence of a nano-Hz gravitational-wave background. As the sensitivity of the GW detectors improves and new detectors join the network, we will detect new sources and phenomena. There is also an ongoing international effort to expand the frequency band of GW observations and to build the next-generation detectors. This talk will summarise the current results from GW observations and future expectations.
Ajith Parameswaran is an astrophysicist at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. His research spans various aspects of gravitational-wave physics and astronomy. He has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2004. Ajith has been a Ramanujan Fellow, a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and the head of the Max Planck Partner Group on Astrophysical Relativity at ICTS. As a member of the team that discovered gravitational waves, he is the recipient of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize.
