Gravitational wave astronomy is revolutionizing our understanding of the Universe. Since the historic discovery of GW150914 five years ago, the LIGO and Virgo detectors have discovered 50 compact binary merger events. These merger events, lasting from fractions of seconds to minutes, include stellar-mass binary black holes, binary neutron stars and likely neutron star-black hole binaries. Meanwhile, pulsar timing arrays have been used to search for gravitational waves with periods of years to decades.
After several decades of international efforts, it is believed that we are approaching the sensitivity to detect waves from supermassive binary black holes. In this talk, I will summarize recent progress and future prospects of gravitational wave astronomy on both short and long timescales, with a focus on the study of binary neutron stars and the multimessenger search for supermassive binary black holes.

Dr ZHU Xingjiang (朱兴江) is currently an OzGrav Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Before joining Monash in July 2017, he was first a PhD student (2011-15) and then a Research Associate (2015-17) at The University of Western Australia.
Dr Zhu's research interests include gravitational-wave astrophysics, pulsars and probabilistic data analysis. He is a member of the steering committee for the International Pulsar Timing Array collaboration, as well as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. In 2019, Dr Zhu was named as one of top 40 young researchers in Australia by The Australian Newspaper.