Hawking thrilled with gravitational wave discovery, PM lauds India role

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Hawking thrilled with gravitational wave discovery, PM lauds India role

An artist's rendering of an outburst on an ultra-magnetic neutron star, also called a magnetar is shown in this handout. Scientists on Thursday announced that they were able to detect gravitational w aves for the first time since their existence was first theorised by Albert Einstein.(REUTERS)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Indian scientists for their role in helping to detect gravitational waves for the first time since their existence was theorised by Albert Einstein.

“Immensely proud that Indian scientists played an important role in this challenging quest,” he tweeted.



Immensely proud that Indian scientists played an important role in this challenging quest.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi)February 11, 2016


“Historic detection of gravitational waves opens up new frontier for understanding of universe,” he said in a series of posts on the microblogging website.



Historic detection of gravitational waves opens up new frontier for understanding of universe!

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi)February 11, 2016


US Scientists announced on Thursday that they had detected, heard and measured gravitational waves, a scientific triumph that is being compared to Galileo first turning a telescope to the heavens 400 years ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, head of LIGO Laboratory, the scientific facility that found them, to applause at a crowded news briefing in DC.




Physicist Gabriela González, one of the four scientists present when LIGO announced that it had detected gravitational waves for the first time. (Photo courtesy: Louisiana State University )
The waves captured were triggered by two blackholes colliding to form a larger blackhole approximately 1.3 billion years ago, according to scientists making the announcement.

They were captured by the LIGO — Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — facility in Louisiana at 551AM on September 14, 2015, and confirmed by another such device in Washington state.

Sixty Indian scientists from nine Indian institutes were part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that is involved in research and analysis of data generated from the detector.

Noted theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking took to Facebook to express his joy at the landmark discovery.

“As a theoretical physicist, I have spent my life contributing to our understanding of the universe.” he wrote. “It is thrilling to see predictions I made over 40 years ago such as the black hole area and uniqueness theorems being observed within my lifetime.”




(Image courtesy: Stephen Hawking’s official Facebook page)
Gravitational waves are ripples in the space-time fabric triggered by colliding blackholes or a neutron star (that is formed by explosive death of another star).

These waves were known to scientists only in theory, first propounded — or prophesied, as has also been said — by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity around 100 years ago.

Until September 14, when they were first detected, and February 11, when they were revealed to the world ending days of feverish speculation among scientists and space geeks.

Read: Ripples in space time: Gravitational waves ‘seen’ from black hole

They looked like squiggles on an ECG chart displayed at the announcement, and sounded, in a short 20-millisecond burst, like a “chirp”, as described by a scientist who replayed it for reports.

“Einstein would be beaming wouldn’t he,” said France A Cardova, head of US National Science Foundation, which funded the LIGO facilities and the project.

LIGOs are L-shaped devices each with 4-km-long arms that have laser beams racing back and forth between mirrors to catch, and measure, the tiniest inflection in space.

Watch: Ripples in space-time fabric




There are just two of them now, and both in the US, operated by scientists drawn from all parts of the world. But there are plans for more, including one in Pune, India.

“For the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves,” Reitze, the California-based head of LIGO who could barely conceal his excitement, said.

“We will hear more of these things — we will also hear things we never expected, we never saw before,” he added.

Scientists expect the detection of gravitational waves to help them explore the universe better — “go deeper”, as one of them put it, by unlocking known and unknown mysteries.

Since gravitational waves are not absorbed or reflected by matter, they theoretically carry information on the motion of objects in the universe. By detecting and analysing them, it is believed that we will be able to further our understanding of the creation of the universe and its history.



@pmaitra @cobra commando @Gessler
India will become one very few countries contributing this research.
:india:
 

Rowdy

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As long as the announcements are not made in India no one will credit us. Kapish.
 

dhananjay1

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Is there any current application of gravitational waves or we would have to wait few decades to make any use of it?
 

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As long as the announcements are not made in India no one will credit us. Kapish.
I got this link from a British Defence Forum. You must read about their Indophobia and delusions.
They think they are funding whole of India's space and defence program.
They also keep uploading $hit from Bihar like places and talk like whole India is a $hithole.
They still think Britain is a superpower and their all discussions revolve around India. :lol:
 

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Is there any current application of gravitational waves or we would have to wait few decades to make any use of it?
Reddened part is truth. We have to wait.
European Union has been researching from a period of time.
Now, India and Japan will also start contribution.
China is also showing interest.
 
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dhananjay1

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Reddened part is truth. We have to wait.
European Union has been researching from a period of time.
Now, India and Japan will also start contribution.
China is also showing interest.
By 'we' I meant people in general not Indians specifically. Any known applied use of gravitational wave yet?
 

Rowdy

Co ja kurwa czytam!
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I got this link from a British Defence Forum. You must read about their Indophobia and delusions.
They think they are funding whole of India's space and defence program.
They also keep uploading $hit from Bihar like places and talk like whole India is a $hithole.
They still think Britain is a superpower and their all discussions revolve around India. :lol:
which link???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
 

cobra commando

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First LIGO lab outside U.S. may come up in Maharashtra’s Hingoli

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project that was given the in-principle approval by the Union Cabinet may come up in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district. A senior scientist with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) said to PTI, “Aundh in Hingoli district is a preferred site for the Ligo project. We’ve begun work on it, which includes setting up committees to start the preliminary work.” According to the official, a strip of four km on both sides of a 150- metre wide area was needed to carry out experiments. “So we would not be needing much land,” he said to PTI. “We needed a flat site to carry out the experiments, the four km strips that would require an unhindered straight and flat site for studying the lasers. The Aundh site fits the bill,” said a senior Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) official, according to the PTI report. When contacted, Dr. Tarun Souradeep, official spokesperson for the project said Aundh is one of the likely choices for a site. “Recommendations have been made and the site has been reviewed by LIGO labs. Our team has visited the site but we are yet to make a final announcement,” he said. LIGO-India will bring considerable opportunities for Indian scientists in instrumentation and development also, as they along with industry members will be engaged in the construction of the eight km-long beam tube at ultra- high vacuum on a levelled terrain.

First LIGO lab outside U.S. may come up in Maharashtra’s Hingoli
 

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The ambitious plan to make India the new center of the experimental physics world

The plans for LIGO India are sending ripples through the physics universe.(Handout/Reuters)
In 2016, a week after scientists in the US clinked champagne glasses to celebrate the monumental discovery of gravitational waves in February, an Indian physicist slowly paced across his office in Bangalore, sitting at his desk then standing back, bouncing around with nervous energy. Bala Iyer’s eyes flickered between his phone and computer, cycling between news sites, searching for the announcement he’d been waiting for over the past two decades. A few minutes later, an online alert finally put an end to his wait. The Narendra Modi government had given the green light for a massive project: the construction of a gravitational wave observatory in India.
Iyer couldn’t believe it at first. “I was still dazed, so I got my younger colleagues to reconfirm the news,” he says. But it was true: the Indian government “in principle” approved an estimated budget of $201 million for building an advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) on home soil.
Iyer’s dream to bring the experiment to his motherland began in the 1980s, when a small group of Indian physicists led by Sanjeev Dhurandhar first made the case for a gravitational wave observatory. The arguments were met with silence from the government and other organizations that might have had the power or deep pockets to make such a project happen. Without support or funding, Dhurandhar and Iyer went back to their research. In 1989, Iyer spent a sabbatical interning with renowned French theorists Thibault Damour and Luc Blanchet, working on calculating the nature of gravitational waves using Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He eventually became a part of the scientific group that, in 2016, detected the first gravitational waves on earth, an experimental proof of Einstein’s century-old equations.
But all the while, the close-knit group of Indian physicists continued to plot how they could get an observatory in their home country. In 2009, they formed the Council of the Indian Initiative in Gravitational Wave Observations Consortium (IndIGO), which Iyer now chairs. The group relentlessly pursued a collaboration with the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the primary funder of the two existing LIGO detectors in America. After a series of proposals and much deliberation among the international community of gravitational wave scientists, NSF agreed to co-host the third LIGO observatory in India.
Much like its twin counterparts in Livingston, Louisiana and The Hanford Site (a decommissioned nuclear complex near Richland, Washington), LIGO India will be an interferometer with two highly sensitive, four-kilometer-long arms joined in the shape of the letter L, with laser lights bouncing off spherical mirrors at the end of each arm. When a wave passes through the detector—distorting the fabric of time and space—the laser beams from the two arms will fall out of phase, registering an interference pattern at the vertex.

LIGO’s Livingston detector site. (LIGO)
The physical measurements required for gravitational wave detection are arguably the most accurate ever made. “The experiment is sensitive to the fluctuations of the mile-long arm geometries down to the level of the size of a nucleus,” says Rana Adhikari, an experimental scientist and member of the LIGO team at Caltech. “To cancel and isolate from any noise produced by the human environment is herculean in itself, let alone detect waves coming from 1.3 billion light years away.”
To execute such a complex experiment in India, LIGO India will bring together experts from three of the country’s top research institutes: the University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), and the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR). The team currently operating the US detectors will provide the Indian researchers with the hardware for a complete LIGO interferometer that detects the wave signals; technical data on its design, installation and commissioning; and the training required to build and run the observatory. The Indian team will provide the site; all other infrastructure required to house and operate the interferometer; and the labor, materials, and supplies for installing, commissioning, and operating the detector. The plan is to have it operational by 2024.
The India LIGO project is not a charity case. Most existing detectors lie in the northern hemisphere, so LIGO is currently unable to accurately determine the sources of gravitational waves from the southern sky. An observatory in India will help to triangulate the sources of the waves, in much the same way that three cell phone towers are required to identify the location of a cell phone. Two observatories are only sufficient to confirm a detection, but a third detector will expand the network of search and allow scientists to estimate the position of the sources of waves with the span of milliseconds.
The ambitious LIGO project will test the skills of India’s engineering, logistics, and manufacturing industries, as the infrastructure requires state-of-the-art technology and absolute precision. It could also have major downstream effects, since the tech developed could end up being used on lots of other projects, like a particle accelerator or high-precision lasers for medical optics.
But perhaps the most extraordinary impact of LIGO India will be on the burgeoning crop of aspiring Indian physicists and scientists, especially in the field of experimental science. “India has produced some very prominent scientists, but there has been more scope on the theoretical side in colleges and research institutes due to lack of equipment and facilities,” says Adhikari. Like most scientists born in India, he started off as a theorist, but while pursuing his degree oversees, he finally had a chance to get his hands dirty with real equipment and switched to the experimental side.
Adhikari was one of the strongest voices who pushed for the formation of IndIGO in 2009. But now, the consortium doesn’t even need loud advocates: when IndIGO was founded, it had just 11 members; today there are 139 scientists—65 were part of the LIGO collaboration that detected the first gravitational waves. Iyer believes that the community will grow up to about 250 by 2025. “Indian scientists and engineers have always collaborated with many milestone international projects hosted abroad,” Iyer says, “but LIGO India will be the first of its kind, a mega international project set up on our home soil. It will be our turn to shine.”

Prime Minister Modi presides over the signing of the memorandum of understanding with the US for hosting the third LIGO detector in India. (Press Trust Of India (PTI))
LIGO’s first data center in India will be based at IUCAA, in Pune, 150 kilometers (93 miles) outside Mumbai. (LIGO already has five other data centers; four in Germany and one in the US.) Even before the LIGO India detector is complete, scientists there will begin to analyze data coming in from existing detectors when the next run of LIGO begins in September.
But Iyer knows that there is still a long way to go. “We have just set up the base camp of our summit, but the Everest is yet to be conquered,” he says. They still need to figure out where they’re going to build the thing: out of 22 sites proposed as options, three locations have been shortlisted for final technical evaluations for the observatory.
Once it’s there, everything will change. “The presence of world-class infrastructure in the form of the LIGO detector and the latest R&D will attract the right talent for experimental physics from all across the country,” says Adhikari. “India will be synonymous with some of the biggest discoveries of our time.”
 

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