India to host third LIGO gravitational wave detector

18 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The Indian government has approved an investment of 320 million dollars to build LIGO-India, a third gravitational wave detector in addition to the two already existing in the US.

It is an almost identical version of the twin LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) facilities that made history after conducting the first direct detection of waves in space-time known as gravitational waves in 2015. The first observations with this third facility are expected by the end of the decade.

LIGO-India is a collaboration between the LIGO Laboratory, operated by Caltech and MIT and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and India’s Raja Ramanna Center for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) and the Institute for Research on Plasma (IPR), among others.

The planned facility, which, like the LIGO observatories in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, will include an L-shaped interferometer with 4-kilometer-long arms, it will be built near the city of Aundha in the Indian state of Maharashtra.

IT WILL FILL BLIND SPOTS IN THE CURRENT GLOBAL NETWORK

When LIGO-India is completed, will join a global network of gravitational wave observatories that includes Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. With its advanced gravitational wave sensing technology, LIGO-India will greatly improve scientists’ ability to identify the locations in the sky of gravitational wave sources. Due to its location on Earth with respect to LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, it will also fill in blind spots in the current gravitational wave network, reports Caltech.

So far, LIGO and Virgo have detected the massive noises from dozens of collisions between black holes. In 2017, the observatories also detected a collision between neutron stars that sent out not only gravitational waves, but also a powerful burst of light waves spanning the electromagnetic spectrum.

Because all three gravitational wave detectors (the twin LIGO and Virgo facilities) were observing the sky during the 2017 event, the scientists were able to narrow down the region of the sky where the event occurred. This turned out to be a crucial factor in guiding light-based telescopes to pinpoint the precise location of the spectacular explosion. Light-based observations led to the discovery that heavy elements, such as gold, were forged in the cosmic explosion.