Dr. Ben Farr will present his colloquium topic, “Hearing the forest for the trees: Understanding LIGO/Virgo’s plurality of singularities” in-person.

Abstract: With the impending start of their fourth observing run, the LIGO and Virgo detectors have collected an impressive census of compact binary mergers in the local universe. By the end of the second observing run in August 2017 the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration claimed a total of 10 binary blackhole mergers and one binary neutron star merger. The third observing run (O3) spanned April 2019 through March 2020, include many significant discoveries (e.g., neutron star-black hole binaries, surprisingly massive black holes) and culminated in the third catalog of Compact binary mergers, GWTC-3, which raised the total catalog of confidently detected binary mergers to 90. I will present some of what ground-based gravitational wave astronomy has taught us about compact binaries over the last eight years, and what may lie ahead.