Abstract: One of the most notable developments since the 2010 Decadal Survey is the addition of gravitationalwaves (GW) to the astronomers’ suite of tools for understanding the Universe. LIGO’s2015 detection of gravitational waves (Abbott et al. 2016) from the merger of a pair of black holesroughly 30 times the mass of our Sun garnered tremendous excitement from both the public andthe scientific community and raised interesting questions as to the origin of such systems. To datea total of 11 confirmed …