Cabinet approves LIGO-India, to cost Rs 2,600 crore
New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Thursday gave its nod to a project to construct and set up a Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory- India (LIGO-India) at an estimated cost of Rs 2,600 crore which is likely to be completed by 2030.
Briefing reporters, Union minister Jitendra Singh said that it will come up in Hingoli district of Maharashtra, where land has been acquired to the tune of 174 acres. The observatory will help in better understanding of astronomical objects like neutron stars and black holes and for in-depth study of gravitational waves.
There are already two such LIGO observatories in the US. LIGO-India will be the third such advanced gravitational-wave observatory as part of the worldwide network.
It is envisaged as a collaborative project between a consortium of Indian research institutions and the LIGO Laboratory in USA, along with its international partners.
LIGO-India had received the government’s in-principle approval in February 2016. Since then, the project reached several milestones towards selecting and acquiring a site and building the observatory.
The United States will provide key components for the lab worth $80 million, which amounts to Rs 560 crore.
The LIGO-India project will be built by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology, with a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the National Science Foundation, the US, along with several national and international research and academic institutions.
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.
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.
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.
with agency inputs
