Speaker
Description
At present, the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (LVK) Collaborations have announced the discovery of 218 gravitational-wave events. The forthcoming release of fifth gravitational-wave transient catalog GWTC-5 will increase the number of detections significantly. In this talk I summarise some of the most exciting developments associated with LVK detections with a focus on fundamental physics and cosmology. I describe how the observation of a gap in the distribution of black-hole masses teaches us about the nuclear physics of pair instability supernovae. I discuss how gravitational-wave astronomers used the exceptionally loud event GW250114 to test Hawking's area law. Time permitting, I discuss what we have learned about the formation of binary black holes.