Jay Wadekar (IAS)

Nearly all of the previous gravitational wave (GW) searches in the LIGO-Virgo data include GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics which are predicted by general relativity. I will present detections of ~10 new black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a novel search pipeline that includes the higher-order harmonics. The black holes in some of the new detections have astrophysically interesting properties such as occupation of the pair-instability mass gap, high-redshift (1<z<2), and positive effective spins. Towards the end, I will change gears and talk about using low-mass gas-rich dwarf galaxies like Leo T as calorimetric dark matter detectors.