LIGO: Detecting Gravitational Waves

Written in 2015, before the discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, this unit summarizes the physics and expected signals from the three most likely sources of gravitational waves: coalescing binary systems, impulsive events (such as supernovae or gamma-ray bursts) and continuous wave sources (such as spherically asymmetric pulsars). We also touch on stochastic sources of gravitational radiation, and briefly discuss other observatories that are planned for future observations of different bands in the gravitational wave spectrum.