Almost one hundred years ago the great Albert Einstein published the theory of General Relativity and gravitational waves were one of the major predictions of this theory. Gravitational waves are a disturbance in the curvature of space-time caused by the motions of matter and they propagate as a wave, traveling outward from a moving object or system of objects. Important examples of systems which emit gravitational waves are binary star systems, where the two stars in the binary are white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. (Even seemingly less dynamic systems, like our solar system, generate gravity waves as the planets revolve around the sun, but at much smaller amplitudes.) But when Einstein predicted gravitational waves, technology was not at the point where detection of gravitational waves was possible.
By the 1970s, scientists realized the applicability of laser interferometry to gravitational wave measurements. One of them was Rainer Weiss, who is now professor emeritus of physics at MIT. Based on his design, LIGO was built and this project was funded by the National Science Foundation. So scientist started working on laser interferometry and in August 2002, LIGO started searching gravitational waves. Its aim is to detect the gravitational waves from black holes, binary stars, neutron stars and the remnants of gravitational radiation left over form the Big Bang.
