Gravitational Waves: Indians working with LIGO cheer on 'path-breaking' discovery

IUCAA, INDIGO helped the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory in its discovery of the gravitational waves

“We have detected gravitational waves,” the moment this announcement was made by David Reitze,  director, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in the US,  the young scientists at Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCCA) cheered up and celebrated this occasion. The Indian scientists also have contributed significantly for finding out for gravitational waves.

Around 100 years ago, Albert Einstein had predicted the gravitational waves which are now confirmed and detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) — specialised laboratories in Louisiana and Washington in the US. 

IUCAA is one of 15 institutes in the country associated with the LIGO project, but the centre incubated the project since the beginning. The detection was also contributed to by INDIGO (Indian Initiative in Gravitational Wave Observations).

A group by Sanjeev Dhurandhar at IUCAA had initiated the foundation work on developing data analysis techniques to detect these weak gravitational wave signals buried in the detector noise by looking for the best match between the calculated waveforms and the detector signal. 

"IUCAA was involved in the project from the time gravitational waves were not taken seriously in India. LIGO observations began in September last year; the results came in as early as the first week after observations began. This discovery is important and path-breaking because claims were made in the past regarding detection of gravitational waves, but they were proved wrong," said Somak Raychaudhury, director of Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).

Also, the theory of black holes merging was earlier been predicted in 1971 by Indian scientist C V Vishweshwara who was a special guest at IUCCA on Thursday night. 

"It was my fortune that I had the opportunity to work on black holes when others were working on different things. Before I came here, even I was not told about this finding. They were very secretive about it," he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also praised the role of Indian scientists who were part of the team that discovered gravitational waves.

"Immensely proud that Indian scientists played an important role in this challenging quest," PM Modi tweeted after the great discovery was announced by scientists," Modi said.

In a series of tweets, Modi added, "The historic detection of gravitational waves will open up new frontier for understanding of universe.Hope to move forward to make even bigger contribution with an advanced gravitational wave detector in the country." 

A common research facility for astronomy and astrophysics was proposed by Dr. Yash Pal of the planning commission. Working on this idea, eminent astrophysicist Prof. Jayant Narlikar, along with Ajit Kembhavi and Naresh Dadhich set up IUCAA within the Pune University campus in 1988. It is an autonomous institution under University Grants Commission (UGC) of India to promote the nucleation and growth of active groups in astronomy and astrophysics at Indian universities.