India’s role in studying gravitational waves — touted as one of the most important discoveries of the recent past — will increase once the proposed gravitational wave observatory is set up in Maharashtra, said David Reitze, executive director of Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
The observatory is expected to start functioning by 2025.“The more detectors we have and depending on where they are, the more accurately we are able to point in the direction in the sky. India having a detector improves that dramatically and that’s going to be a big mission,” said Mr. Reitze.
Gravitational waves are ‘ripples’ in the fabric of space-time, caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe such as merger of black holes or neutron stars. Its discovery saw three scientists get the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2017.
Already, several physicists from Bengaluru-based International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) are an active part of the LIGO project. In an interaction with The Hindu on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of ICTS, Mr. Reitze said after fourth successful detection in September 2017, focus will now be on expanding their reach within the universe.
“We know we have binary black holes and binary neutron stars, so there must be a neutron star and black hole merger. We want to detect that. Our detectors are not very sensitive to supernovas because the amount of energy released by supernova in gravitational waves is very tiny, may be a billionth of what comes out of a black hole merger,” Mr. Reitze said, hoping that they would be able to make a breakthrough in the coming years.
One way was to make the detector at least 40% more effective, allowing them to be more sensitive.
At present, the LIGO detectors are sensitive to about 70 to 80 megaparsec (280 million to 300 million light years) for binary neutron stars and for binary black holes, the sensitivity is about 2 gigaparsec (approximately 3 billion light years). With improved sensitivity, these detectors will be able to fetch information from farther distances in space.
“Our detectors, even though they are very sensitive and capable of detecting gravitational waves, they are not where we want them to be. We know they can be more sensitive, so we have a period of about a year where we are improving our detectors and trying to understand as to why they are not as good as we want them to be. We hope to be at least 30% to 40% more sensitive, which will make a big difference.”
Scientific community roots for more investment
India needs to increase its investment in basic sciences to keep up with China that is exploiting its immense population base to further their scientific research, said scientists, who were part of a panel discussion on ‘The usefulness of useless knowledge’ at a city college here on Sunday.
It is the responsibility of the government and private sector to be more generous, said Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy. Mathematician Manjul Bhargava added that the country needed a change in attitude to perceive knowledge for the sake of passion.
