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David Hogg, New York University

Eugene Vasiliev, University of Surrey

Jennifer Yee, Harvard University

One century following Einstein's prediction of spacetime disturbances and gravitational waves, the laser-enabled special detectors LIGO achieved the most accurate measurement ever made by humans across science and engineering and revealed to us the gravitational-wave signals produced by the most powerful collisions of black holes in the universe. These revolutionary discoveries have given birth to a brand new field of astronomy, a completely new way of sensing the cosmos and exploring its darkest corners. I will review the first direct detections of gravitational waves and what they can teach us about the nature of black holes and other exotic cosmic events.

The arm structure of the Milky Way remains somewhat of an unknown, with observational studies hindered by our location within the Galactic disk. We present the results of a project aimed at constraining the global structure of the Milky Way through numerous numerical simulations and synthetic observations.