A boost for Science, a wider window to the universe

Context:

The United States National Science Foundation is partnering with top U.S. universities and India’s Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, or RRCAT (a unit of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India) to launch LIGO-India.

Background

• General theory of relativity: Albert Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity first predicted the phenomenon of gravitational waves. But it took physicists another century to prove the theory.
• Failed to observe: Most of the history of astronomy has been accomplished by observing light and the electromagnetic spectrum, everything from radio waves to infrared and visible light to high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, but gravitational waves are fundamentally different. They are ripples in space-time, the fabric of the universe itself.
• First observation: In 2015, for the first time in human history, physicists observed the gravitational waves emanating from two merging black holes, 1.3 million light years from earth.