Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO Project:
LIGO is an international network of laboratories.
- It aims to detect the ripples in spacetime produced by the movement of large celestial objects.
- LIGO-India is a collaborative project between a consortium of Indian research institutions and the LIGO Laboratory in the USA, along with its international partners.
- It will be located in the Hingoli district of Maharashtra.
- It was built by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology with an MoU with the S. National Science Foundation
- Objective is to detect and study gravitational waves.
- LIGOs are designed to measure changes in distance that are several orders of magnitude smaller than the length of the proton.
- This project will see India join the global effort to detect and study gravitational waves, which were first theorized in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
- Gravitational waves are extremely weak and difficult to detect.
- They were first directly detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015.
- LIGO-India is set to become the country’s largest scientific facility after the government gave the final green light for its construction.
