Ten Years of Gravitational Wave Observations

The Advanced LIGO and VIRGO observatories achieved a first detection of gravitational waves from a merging binary black hole system in 2015. The subsequent years have yielded around a hundred further gravitational-wave signals from compact binaries. Gravitational wave astronomy has transitioned from a field with notable single detections to a stage in which large catalogs of events enable a systematic survey of the population of merging binary sources in the Universe. Achieving and interpreting each of these detections has required us to improve our understanding of general relativity in the strong-field regime. Remarkably, these theoretical improvements have also enabled us to start piecing together the story of how the sources could have been assembled from their collective properties. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the detections and what we have learned about gravitational-wave sources from the observations so far.