Dr. Shasvath Kapadia

With the announcement of tens of detections of compact binary mergers by the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra collaboration, there is no doubt that gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy has well and truly arrived. Remarkably, GW astronomy interfaces organically with a number of important and established branches of astrophysics and cosmology, which I will demonstrate over the course of this talk. I will also elaborate on some key aspects of GW detection and inference. These include distinguishing true signals from noise transients, astrophysical classification of candidate events, inferring rates of compact binary mergers, constraining models of compact binary populations with GW data, enhanced GW-early warning and the rapid inference of a source's sky-location, and placing GW data-driven constraints on aspects of early-Universe models.