Popular astronomy talk. 

How do we receive information from the Universe? I will speak about 2 of our most important sources of information, light and gravitational waves, and how the advent of routine gravitational wave detection over the last decade has revolutionized our understanding of many parts of our Universe. The gravitational wave detection of binary black hole mergers especially has opened new questions in how these highly energetic events can be made, and how to relate what we are learning using gravitational waves to what we already knew about our Universe using light. We'll explore together some of the places binary black holes might merge, and what work scientists are doing right now, as well as our plans for the next decade. This will include a short tour of how stars are born and die, special environments like super-dense star clusters, and the neighborhoods around supermassive black holes that live at the centers of galaxies. I'll also explain a bit about what gravitational waves are and how they are related to light.