· 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.
· The project involves constructing a network of L-shaped arms, each four kilometres long, which can detect even the faintest ripples from cosmic explosions millions of light years away.
· One Advanced LIGO detector is moved from Hanford to India.
· It is third of its kind in the world. Two are at Hanford in the State of Washington, north-western USA, and one is at Livingston in Louisiana, south-eastern USA. Currently these observatories are being upgraded to their advanced configurations.
· A proposal to prospect 121 hectares of forest land in Dudhala village, Hingoli had submitted by the LIGO – India consortium. The consortium is yet to formally declare the Dudhala site as the host of the interferometers.
· The construction of such a large and sensitive device requires an extremely flat surface.
· 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. In the case of the LIGO project, it is to check if the land can be made perfectly level at a reasonable cost.
· The prospecting permission was only for sinking boreholes in 0.375 hectares and separate permission would be needed at a later stage for constructing the observatory.
· The LIGO-India project is an international collaboration between the LIGO Laboratory, which provide the complete design and all the key detector components, and three lead institutions in the LIGO-India consortium:
1. Institute of Plasma Research, Gandhinagar;
2. IUCAA, Pune; and
3. Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore.
· Indian scientists would provide the infrastructure to install the detector and it would be operated jointly by LIGO-India and the LIGO-Lab.
· The project, piloted by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and Department of Science and Technology (DST), reportedly costs ₹1,200 crore and is expected to be ready by 2025.
The discovery of gravitational waves earned three U.S. scientists the Nobel for physics in 2017. The scientists were closely involved with LIGO. Hosting such a detector in India, scientists have said, will improve the odds of detecting more such phenomena.
SOURCE : THE HINDU
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