PROFESSOR SANJIT MITRA

The detection of gravitational waves (GW) announced earlier this year marks the beginning of GW Astronomy. While the first detected signals, quite expectedly from binary black hole mergers, received a lot of attention, GW Astronomy has the potential to offer much more excitement. Searches for unmodelled or stochastic sources are designed for this purpose. On the one hand, they promise to estimate gross physical properties of an ensemble of distant sources, boosting our understanding of formation, evolution and distribution of these "known" astrophysical objects, and on the other hand, they provide the only feasible means to search for persistent unknown sources. A network of ground-based GW detectors will have a crucial role to play in this endeavour. Several other present and future experiments aim to probe the stochastic GW, spanning a wide range of frequency bands, with the ultimate goal to observe and characterise the primordial stochastic background, generated perhaps in the first second after the birth of our universe.