LIGO-India marks first anniversary

The mammoth LIGO-India project, for detecting gravitational waves, on Friday completed a year since its approval by the Centre, officials said.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project, is likely to be commissioned in 2024.

“Today is a Friday. Not just any Friday. It is the first anniversary of the LIGO-India project,” Tarun Souradeep, Project Coordinator-IUCAA, LIGO-India tweeted.

India is poised to set up the world’s third advanced LIGO.

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.

LIGO Hanford in its tweets on Friday said: “We’ll be working with Indian colleagues like Tarun Souradeep to build LIGO instrument in India”.

LIGO research is carried out by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration in Europe.

LIGO India is a joint scientific collaboration between LIGO laboratories of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the US, and three lead Indian institutions, namely, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gandhinagar, and Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore.