Nowadays, the importance of the field lies in the exciting possibility of comparing the theory with contemporary astrophysical observations, made by a new generation of detectors - large-scale optical interferometers LIGO, VIRGO, GEO and TAMA - that should routinely observe the gravitational waves produced by massive and rapidly evolving systems such as inspiralling compact binaries. To prepare these experiments, the required theoretical work consists of carrying out a sufficiently general solution of the Einstein field equations, valid for a large class of matter systems, and describing the physical processes of the emission and propagation of the waves from the source to the distant detector, as well as their back-reaction onto the source.
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http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2002-3 |
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