Abstract.
An enigmatic prediction of Einstein's general theory of
relativity is gravitational
waves. With the observed decay in the orbit of the Hulse-Taylor binary
pulsar
agreeing within a fraction of a percent with the theoretically computed
decay from Einstein's
theory, the existence of gravitational waves was firmly established.
Currently there is a worldwide effort to detect gravitational waves with
inteferometric gravitational
wave observatories or detectors and several such detectors have been
built or
being built. The initial detectors have reached their design
sensitivities and now the
effort is on to construct advanced detectors which are expected to detect
waves from astwaves from astrophysical sources. The era of gravitational wave
astronomy has arrived. This
article describes the worldwide effort which includes the effort on the
Indian front - the IndIGO project, the principle underlying
interferometric detectors
both on ground and in space, the principal noise sources that plague
such detectors,
the astrophysical sources of gravitational waves that one expects to
detect by these detectors
and some glimpse of the data analysis methods involved in extracting the
very
weak gravitational wave signals from detector noise.
Keywords : gravitational waves - black holes - stars: binaries -
techniques: interferometric
- instrumentation: interferometers