Gravitational-wave astronomy: what we’ve found so far and what we're still looking for

by Prof. David Keitel (Universitat de les Illes Balears, Palma de Mallorca, Spain)

Thursday Jun 19, 2025, 2:30 PM → 3:30 PM Europe/Rome

Dipartimento/1-1 - Sala Consiglio (Dipartimento)

Ten years ago, the gravitational-wave window onto the Universe was opened with the first detection of a black-hole merger. Since then, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration have found hundreds of high-significance signals, all so far from compact binary coalescences. These have enabled many new insights into the astrophysics of compact objects and the evolutionary history of massive stars, and are a completely novel probe for cosmology and fundamental physics. With the currently ongoing fourth observing run, future detector upgrades and completely new observatories, we will be able to reach much deeper into our Universe's population of merging compact objects. But we are also still hunting for many more types of gravitational-wave sources that require new detection methods and offer new scientific potentials. After a general review of the current state and future prospects of the field, this talk will focus on two exciting candidates for the "next first detection": gravitationally lensed gravitational waves as well as signals from spinning neutron stars.