Hunting for Continuous Gravitational Waves: Recent Searches and Astrophysical Implications

In recent years, direct observations of transient gravitational waves from catastrophic collisions of black holes and neutron stars have opened a new window to the extreme universe. Meantime, the hunt for other sources and types of gravitational waves, like the much fainter continuous gravitational radiation emitted by non-axisymmetric spinning neutron stars or ultralight-boson clouds around black holes, has also been going on. This talk will present the searches for continuous waves in the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Virgo and discuss the resulting astrophysical implications.