Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy in the nascent era

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state and future prospects of gravitational wave physics and astronomy, emphasizing detector improvements, key sources like black holes and neutron stars, and the potential for new physics insights.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of gravitational wave sources, detector advancements, and the role of GW observations in probing fundamental physics.

Findings

Detection of gravitational waves has opened new avenues in astrophysics.

Upcoming detector enhancements will increase the number and precision of GW observations.

GW observations serve as a powerful probe for exploring new physics.

Abstract

The detections of gravitational waves (GW) by LIGO/Virgo collaborations provide various possibilities to physics and astronomy. We are quite sure that GW observations will develop a lot both in precision and in number owing to the continuous works for the improvement of detectors, including the expectation to the newly joined detector, KAGRA, and the planned detector, LIGO-India. In this occasion, we review the fundamental outcomes and prospects of gravitational wave physics and astronomy. We survey the development focusing on representative sources of gravitational waves: binary black holes, binary neutron stars, and supernovae. We also summarize the role of gravitational wave observations as a probe of new physics.