Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory Project in India

•  Maharashtra State Cabinet has decided to hand over 40.68 hectare government land to the Atomic Energy Department to build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory Project (LIGO India Project) at Dudhala village in Hingoli district.
• In April this year, India and United States had signed an MoU to set up the LIGO Observatory that recently proved the existence of gravitational waves envisaged by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago.
• With this project, India will join an elite league of countries that support research on gravitational waves. Besides the U.S, U.K, Italy, Germany and Japan have ongoing research in the area.
• The two current LIGO Observatories are located at Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, and are operated by Caltech and MIT.
• The LIGO project is run with the collaboration of 90 universities and research institutions. Thirty people of Indian origin are part of the LIGO project.

About LIGO:

• Founded in 1997, the LSC is currently made up of more than 1000 scientists from dozens of institutions and 15 countries worldwide
• The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) is a group of scientists seeking to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves, use them to explore the fundamental physics of gravity, and develop the emerging field of gravitational wave science as a tool of astronomical discovery. The LSC works toward this goal through research on, and development of techniques for, gravitational wave detection; and the development, commissioning and exploitation of gravitational wave detectors.
• The LSC carries out the science of the LIGO Observatories, located in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana as well as that of the GEO600 detector in Hannover, Germany.

About Gravitational waves:

• It comes a century after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity held that acceleration of massive bodies should produce gravitational waves, which travel through the universe at the speed of light.
• The gravitational waves detected, and announced to the world, were produced more than a billion years ago by a cataclysmic collision of two black holes, one of them with a mass 36 times that of the Sun and the other slightly smaller at 29 times, into one black hole.
• The gravitational waves give scientists insights into the final moments before the merger.
• Gravitational waves are disturbances in the fabric of spacetime. If you drag your hand through a still pool of water, you’ll notice that waves follow in its path, and spread outward through the pool. According to Albert Einstein, the same thing happens when heavy objects move through spacetime.But how can space ripple? According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, spacetime isn’t a void, but rather a four-dimensional “fabric,” which can be pushed or pulled as objects move through it. These distortions are the real cause of gravitational attraction.

India's contribution:

• This giant step for science is the result of truly global cooperation, but Indian Scientist contributed immensely toward this project. About 60 researchers from more than a dozen institutions in India were part of the over-1,000-strong army of scientists in the collaboration.
• Nearly 35 Indian scientists are co-authors of the landmark scientific paper that describes the results. The way to find the signal buried in the noise came from an Indian scientist. Similarly, the oscillation of cosmic bodies after a collision was predicted by an Indian scientist back in 1971.
• Several observatories widely separated from one another will help in determining the direction of any event with greater accuracy and also confirm the genuineness of the signal.
• Now, Government of India approved to construct the proposed Rs.1,260-crore gravitational wave observatory in India which could help obtain unique information about the universe; unlike light, gravitational waves can pass through the universe unobstructed and hence carry otherwise unobtainable information. The facility would also provide a much-needed technological boost and immensely benefit researchers based in India. There will be then possibility to hear "chirp" sound of gravitational wave.

Analysis:

• This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory
• The detection at once improves our understanding of the workings of the universe and, more important, throws open a big opportunity to study it from completely new angles. It opens the way to get information about the evolution of galaxies and black holes. This is because, we can currently only see celestial objects that emit electromagnetic radiation — visible light, X-rays, gamma rays, and so on. But some objects — like colliding black holes or the smoking gun of the Big Bang — don't emit any electromagnetic radiation. They emit gravity. And that's why, with this discovery, invisible objects in the universe may soon become visible.
• The successful capture of gravitational waves by LIGO is a testimony to humankind’s scientific and engineering expertise to build extraordinarily sensitive instrumentation capable of detecting variations of the order of a thousandth of the diameter of a proton.
• This discovery may inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe.
• 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.

By: Vishal