The LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors, supported by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, have now detected both a handful of binary black holes as well as a fortuitous capture of signals from a binary neutron star, enabling a world-wide electromagnetic followup. The technique and the fundamental physics challenges to the detectors will be presented, a summary of the astrophysics results given, and a roadmap for future detectors sketched.