Speaker
Description
Starting with the first detection of gravitational waves (GWs) in September 2015, a total of 90 compact binary coalescences have been identified during the first three observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration, including mergers between black holes (BHs), neutron stars (NSs) and mixed NS-BHs. These GW observations allowed us to infer some properties of the NS and BH populations, such as the mass distributions and the merger rates, and to better understand the astrophysics of binary mergers and the origin of these systems.
On May 2023 the fourth LVK observing run has started and it will continue until the beginning of 2025: dozens of GW candidates are being found with online analysis, and these observations will be key to further expand our comprehension of the population of merging binary compact objects.
This talk will give an overview of the GW detections so far, their astrophysical implications and the prospects for the upcoming years.
