LIGO India, Meant to Study Gravitational Waves, To Be Ready By ’24

The LIGO India project is likely to be commissioned in 2024. The LIGO India centre, which will study cosmic gravitational waves, will only be the third one in the world. However, this would require Indian universities to churn out young researchers trained in the science, according to the announcement made by LIGO Laboratory.

About LIGO India

  • The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is a massive observatory for detecting cosmic gravitational waves and for carrying out experiments. The objective is to use gravitational-wave observations in astronomical studies.
  • The project operates three gravitational-wave (GW) detectors. Two are at Hanford in the state of Washington, north-western US, and one is at Livingston in Louisiana, south-eastern US. The proposed LIGO India project aims to move one advanced LIGO detector from Hanford to India.
  • LIGO research is carried out by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration in Europe.
  • LIGO India will be set up as a joint scientific collaboration between LIGO laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the US, and three lead Indian institutions, namely, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gandhinagar, and Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore.

Gravitational Waves

  • Gravitational waves are the ripples in the pond of spacetime.
  • The gravity of large objects warps space and time, or “spacetime” as physicists call it, the way a bowling ball changes the shape of a trampoline as it rolls around on it.
  • Smaller objects will move differently as a result – like marbles spiraling toward a bowling-ball-sized dent in a trampoline instead of sitting on a flat surface.

Difficult to detect these waves

The reason that gravitational waves have been so difficult to detect is that their effects are tinier than tiny. In fact, the signals they produce are so small that scientists struggle to remove enough background noise to confirm them.

Useful to India and World

  • These waves will be particularly useful for studying black holes (the existence of which was first implied by Einstein’s theory) and other dark objects, because they’ll give scientists a bright beacon to search for even when objects don’t emit actual light.
  • With this, mapping the abundance of black holes and frequency of their mergers could get a lot easier.
  • Since they pass through matter without interacting with it, gravitational waves would come to Earth carrying undistorted information about their origin.
  • They could also improve methods for estimating the distances to other galaxies.

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