  The direct detection of gravitational waves from binary mergers has been
hailed as the discovery of the century. In the light of recent evidence on the
existence of gravitational waves, it is now possible to know about the
properties of matter under extreme conditions in compact astrophysical objects
and different dynamical spacetimes. The foremost theme of the present article
is to bring out the various features of the interaction between photons and
gravitons that can be used in astrophysical observations. The effective action
of interacting photons containing light-matter coupling and self-interaction
term is constructed by eliminating the graviton degrees of freedom coupled to
both matter and photons. It is shown that the equation of state of matter can
be probed from the dynamics of light in this theory. The vacuum birefringence
is also shown to be a generic property in this theory that arises from the
non-linear nature of the self-interaction between gauge fields. Further, the
non-local nature of quantum effective action with modified dispersion relation
is also discussed in great detail. The above results also open an alternate way
to infer the properties of gravitational waves without their direct measurement
using the features of photon-graviton interaction.
