The Union Cabinet on April 6 approved a project to build an advanced gravitational-wave detector in Maharashtra at an estimated cost of Rs 2,600 crore.
Key points
- The facility’s construction is expected to be completed by 2030. It will come up in Hingoli district, where land has been acquired to the tune of 174 acres.
- LIGO-India will be built by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology, with a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. National Science Foundation and several national and international research institutions.
- The observatory will be the third of its kind, made to the exact specifications of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGO), in Louisiana and Washington in the U.S. LIGO-India will work in tandem with them.
- The project is a collaboration between a consortium of Indian research institutions and the U.S. observatories, plus several international partners.
- The project proponents have since selected a site for the detector, which needs to be flat and free of seismic disturbances; characterising it; and planning the observatory.
About LIGO
- The LIGO is a giant L-shaped instrument. Each arm of the ‘L’ is 4 km long. Two laser pulses are shot through each arm at the same time, and they bounce off a mirror at the end to return to the vertex.
- A detector checks whether the pulses return at the same time. When a gravitational wave passes through the detector, the pulses are slightly out of time. Researchers use this and other signals to detect, record, and study gravitational waves.
- While two LIGOs can study gravitational waves, a third observatory is required to better triangulate the location of a source in the sky.
- A more ideal setup requires four observatories to record the same wave. To this end, researchers are setting up and upgrading detectors in Italy and Japan.
Gravitational waves
- Gravitational waves are emitted by very massive objects in the universe in extreme environments, such as when black holes collide.
- Just as light emitted by an object can be used to probe its electromagnetic properties, gravitational waves can be used to probe the gravitational features of the source.
