Sunday, February 18, 2024

LIGO comes to India to become the second gravitational-wave detector in Asia

Good news! Exciting! What an extraordinary effort to find the location!

"In 2011, three physicists embarked upon a journey across India. They were looking for the best place in the country to listen for the faintest sounds in the universe. ...
India is set to house the next detector of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO. In April 2023, the Indian government approved construction, and by the end of the decade, they expect to see the observatory’s first detections of gravitational waves. ...
In 2015, the first two LIGO detectors—one located in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana—made history by detecting an extraordinary event generated by a pair of colliding blackholes some 1.3 billion light years away. ...
LIGO-India will house an L-shaped, 4-kilometer-by-4-kilometer detector called an interferometer. ...
In the absence of project funds prior to 2016, the team carried out seismic studies by borrowing instruments from geophysics colleagues and training people to use them. Also using data from the Indian Space Research Organization, scientists considered about 40 options across the Indian subcontinent. ...
Their choice, Aundha, is far from the crashing of waves along the Indian coastline and the rumbling of trains along India’s railway systems. The site is situated on a natural barren plateau of the Deccan Traps, a volcanic formation in an otherwise fertile—and populated—region. “It took five years to find the perfect location,” ...
LIGO-India will be the second gravitational-wave detector in Asia, joining the previously built Kagra detector in Japan. ...
Given its position on the opposite side of the globe from the United States, the Indian LIGO detector will be misaligned with the Washington and Louisiana detectors—and this is another key to its usefulness. Because of its location, LIGO-India will measure gravitational waves in a different polarization. ..."

LIGO comes to India | symmetry magazine In India, scientists are building a new LIGO detector, enhancing the capabilities of the observatory that reported the first observation of gravitational waves. 

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