The Indian Union cabinet penned an estimated $335 million (Rs 2,600 crore) deal on the 6th of April 2023, which will see the establishment of an advanced gravitational wave detector in India.

The project, in collaboration with the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) laboratory in the United States and three premier Indian research institutions- the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, the Institute for Plasma Research, and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics- is expected to complete construction by 2030.

Jitendra Singh, Union minister for space and technology, stated that 174 acres of land had been acquired in the Hingoli district, Maharashtra for the observatory- a third of its kind and the first outside the US.

Indian S&T will leap-frog in a number of cutting-edge frontiers of great national relevance, in particular quantum-sensing and metrology, said Tarun Souradeep, director of the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, and former spokesperson of LIGO-India to The Hindu.

An aerial photo of Virgo detector

Gravitational waves are considered to be ripples in the fabric of spacetime. These are emitted by astronomical objects such as black holes and neutron stars.

Although first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves would not be recorded until 1974, when orbital decay of the HulseTaylor binary pulsar was observed.

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India joins global effort to detect gravitational waves with new LIGO ... - Interesting Engineering