Scientists to test land for LIGO

Scientists to test land for LIGO

News:

1. The LIGO detectors discovered the first gravitational waves produced by two giant merging blackholes in 2016.

Important facts:

2. The Environment Ministry has allowed scientists to test the suitability of land in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district to host the India wing of the ambitious Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) project.

3. The project involves constructing a network of L-shaped arms, which can detect even the faintest ripples from cosmic explosions millions of light years away.

4. The discovery of gravitational waves earned three U.S. scientists the Nobel for physics in 2017.

5. Generally, mining companies prospect a region by sinking boreholes to get a sense of the geology of the site and ascertain availability of required minerals and metals.

6. In the case of the LIGO project, it is to check if the land can be made perfectly level at a reasonable cost.

7. The LIGO project operates three gravitational-wave (GW) detectors. Two are at Hanford in the State of Washington, north-western USA, and one is at Livingston in Louisiana, south-eastern USA.

8. The proposed LIGO-India project aims to move one Advanced LIGO detector from Hanford to India.

9. The LIGO-India project is an international collaboration between the LIGO Laboratory and three lead institutions in the LIGO-India consortium: Institute of Plasma Research, Gandhinagar; IUCAA, Pune; and Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore.

10. The LIGO lab would provide the complete design and all the key detector components.

11. Indian scientists would provide the infrastructure to install the detector and it would be operated jointly by LIGO-India and the LIGO-Lab.

12. The project, piloted by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), and is expected to be ready by 2025.