When Albert Einstein predicted the gravitational waves little did he know that one day his prophecy will come true. While the world celebrates the contributions of three scientists who have the bagged the nobel for their outstanding work on gravitational waves, India too has much to cheer about.
If three US scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne won the Physics Nobel, two Indian scientists have contributed immensely to the discovery of gravitational waves.
Predicted first by Albert Einstein a century ago, the waves were first detected in September 2015 in the Laser Inferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) with contribution from two late CV Vishveshwara and Sanjeev Dhurandhar.
India has played a stellar role in the discovery since the late 1980s when Indian scientists started collaborating with LIGO group in the US.
Though three US faces won the Nobel, without the hard work of 37 Indians in total this feat would have not been possible.
These Indian authors part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration made it to the paper on first detection of gravitational waves published in Physical Review Letters in 2016. There have been three more since then; last one announced in August.
Sanjeev Dhurandhar built the mathematical tool that was very important to find the tiny vibrations from the passing gravitational waves.
Dhurandhar, 65, an authority on India’s gravitational wave research, developed algorithms on how to extract gravitational wave signals from sources such as black holes, and how to do it with several detectors.
Known as the black hole man of India, Vishveshwara’s calculation was also used for the discovery. The 78-year-old died earlier this year.
An Indian team comprising 70 scientists across 13 institutes specifically working on the India chapter on the project is specially happy, who widely believe that the Nobel Prize couldn’t have come at a better time with India set to build the third gravitational wave detector (LIGO-INDIA) — most likely in Maharashtra.
At present, the US has two observatories while Italy houses the third called the Virgo Interferometer.
The US detectors cover an area of the sky equivalent to 2,500 moons. An Indian detector however will cover a 100 times smaller area.
The estimated Rs 1,260-crore mega science project first floated in 2011 is piloted by the Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Science and Technology (DST) in collaboration with the LIGO Laboratory US- based Caltech and MIT.
A record 500 people will be working on building the Indian detector.
Given the ongoing research over the century in the sphere of gravitational waves, in 1974, there was an indirect confirmation by researchers who examined radio flashes emitted by a pair of merging neutron stars; the shifts in the flashes’ timing matched earlier predictions of gravitational waves carrying energy away. That discovery was rewarded with the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Physicists in the United States and the then-Soviet Union first proposed using laser interferometers to detect gravitational waves in the 1960s.
The Physics Nobel troika has won almost every prize there was for them to win, including $3-million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics; the $500,000 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize; the $1.2-million Shaw Prize in Astronomy; and the $1-million Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
Scientifically speaking the Einstein prediction was based on a collision of massive destructive forces that occurred 1.3 billion years ago in one part of the universe.
Einstein propagated that such a massive collision would distort the very fabric of space and time itself. He underlined that the cataclysmic disturbance would ripple outward at the speed of light, filling the universe with gravitational waves.
A century ago, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, and it has dominated our understanding of gravity ever since. But physicists (and Einstein himself) have long speculated the theory isn’t complete, as it doesn’t play well with the laws of quantum mechanics.
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