Gravitational wave astronomy

Astronomers rely on a multiplicity of observational perspectives in order to infer the nature of the Universe. Progress in astronomy has historically been associated with new or improved observational perspectives. Gravitational wave detectors now under construction mill provide us with a perspective on the Universe fundamentally different from any we have come to know. With this new perspective comes the hope of new insights and understanding, not just of exotic astrophysical processes, but of ''bread-and-butter'' astrophysics: e.g., stars and stellar evolution, galaxy formation and evolution, neutron star structure, and cosmology. In this report I discuss briefly a small subset of the areas of conventional, ''bread-and-butter'' astrophysics where we can reasonably hope that gravitational wave observations will provide us with valuable new insights and understandings.