LIGO India Project

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Space technology

Concept :

The government has given the final go-ahead to India’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, project.

LIGO India Project

LIGO is an international network of laboratories that detect the ripples in spacetime produced by the movement of large celestial objects like stars and planets.
LIGO-India will be located in Hingoli district of Maharashtra, about 450 km east of Mumbai, and is scheduled to begin scientific runs from 2030.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory)

It is an international network of laboratories meant to detect gravitational waves.
Under this, two large observatories (~ 3000 Km apart) were built in the US (Hanford Site, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana) with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry.
Interferometry is a technique which uses the interference of superimposed waves to extract information.
Besides the US, such gravitational wave observatories are currently operational in Europe and Japan.
LIGO-India will be the fifth, and possibly the final node of the planned network.

Why is a Fifth LIGO Observatory Needed?

Extremely low strength of gravitational waves make their detection very difficult.
Therefore, LIGO-India is part of the plan to expand the network of gravitational wave observatories in order to increase the chances of detecting these waves from anywhere in the observable universe.
This will improve the accuracy and quality of information taken from them.

Gravitational Waves

These are the ripples in space-time produced by the movement of large celestial bodies like stars and planets.
These were postulated over 100 years ago in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that encapsulates the current understanding of how gravitation works.
However, they were first discovered in 2015 by two LIGOs based in the United States.
In 2017, this experimental verification of the century-old theory received the Nobel Prize in Physics (to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne).
Until now, at least 10 events producing gravitational waves have been detected.

Significance for India

For India, LIGO is a momentous milestone. India has been an active collaborator in a number of international science projects.
These include the Large Hadron Collider experiments, and ITER, the effort to create a thermonuclear reactor that would enable controlled nuclear fusion reactions.
India is also expected to be a partner country in setting up the next space station after the current International Space Station comes to the end of its life later this decade.
However, India has not yet built a cutting-edge scientific facility on this scale on its own soil, something that can have huge spin-off benefits for its science and technology sector.
The India-based Neutrino Observatory, one such facility that has been planned in India, has been facing delays.
LIGO, therefore, is crucial to demonstrating India’s intent and capability to pull-off complex science projects on its own.
The new Ligo observatory, in combination with its partners, will let scientists probe deep questions about black holes and neutron stars. “The new detector will improve chances of doing science in India.