I will review the recent announcement of the first detection by LIGO of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, including the data searches and analyses that revealed its presence and properties of the astrophysical sources. I will also discuss the implications of this discovery for testing the theory of general relativity, for the first time, in the strong-field GR, and the astrophysical implications for the formation of binary black holes.

Argonne Physics Division Colloquium Schedule