Nobel for Detecting Gravitational Waves

Why in news?

Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish’s and Kip Thorne’s were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for their contribution to the LIGO-VIRGO project and its detection of gravitational waves.

What is project about?

• Research - Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory – LIGO was built in the US to detect gravitational waves.
• In collaboration with Italy based VIRGO observatory, LIGO detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015.   
• Since then, the LIGO-VIRGO collaboration has detected such signals four times.

• Concept - Gravitational waves are ripples in space.
• It is caused by cataclysmic events that result in high-energy explosions, such as collision of black holes or neutron stars.
• When these disturbances reach far-off regions, the signals become weak and require extremely sensitive detectors to sense them.
• Significance - The first detection made in 2015 revealed the merger of two black holes - 1.3 billion years ago.
• Hence, gravitational wave observations could unravel many more mysteries pertaining to the early days of the universe’s existence.
• Gravitational wave astronomy is hence a science of the near future whereby black holes, neutron stars may be mapped.

How does the future look?

• The advantage of having multiple detectors is that the location of the source can be determined more accurately.
• More observatories are in the pipeline to add to the current 3 of which 2 belongs to LIGO & 1 to VIRGO.
• The Japanese KAGRA detector is set to go online in 2019 and LIGO India set to join by 2024.

Source: The Hindu