Dr Colm Talbot (MIT Kavli Institute)

In the seven years since the first observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, analyses of data from the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors have confirmed the observation of approximately 100 compact binary mergers. These observations have provided rich information about astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. However, we have only scratched the surface of the possible discoveries of gravitational-wave science. To extract the most possible information about the astrophysical distribution of binary black holes from existing and future data from gravitational-wave observatories we will need novel statistical and computational techniques. In this talk, I will summarise some of the insights we have gained from observations of binary black hole mergers, what we can learn in the future, and methods that will be needed to extract this information.