India Poised to Join Hunt for Gravitational Waves

摘要

New Delhi-Every so often in the universe, two neutron stars or black holes collide so violently that space and time themselves shudder. An emerging global network of detectors is watching for these ripples in spacetime, which are predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Now it has a new recruit: India. "India intends to host the third detector" in a U.S.-based array known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced on 3 February at the Indian Science Congress in Jammu. The network's expansion should help physicists pinpoint sources of the waves-assuming they can be detected.