The LIGO and Virgo detectors have directly observed gravitational waves from mergers of pairs of stellar-mass black holes, along with a smaller number of mergers involving neutron stars. These observations raise the hope that compact object mergers could be used as a probe of stellar and binary evolution, and perhaps of stellar dynamics. This colloquium-style article summarises the existing observations, describes theoretical predictions for formation channels of merging stellar-mass black-hole binaries along with their rates and observable properties, and presents some prospects for gravitational-wave astronomy.

Version accepted by Physics Reports