Hans A. Bethe Prize: Implications of the LIGO Discovery of a Binary Black Hole Coalescence

In this talk I will review how we extract astrophysical information from gravitational-wave signals, including source parameters and implied rates of black hole inspirals and mergers. I will discuss the implications of these results in the context of astrophysical models for binary black-hole formation as well as implications for testing general relativity in the strong-field regime, for the first time.