Pune: India’s largest telescope, the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT), close to Narayangaon in Pune district.
| Photo Credit: PTI
India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) was one among the world’s six massive telescopes that performed a key function find the first direct proof for the relentless vibrations of the material of the universe, attributable to ultra-low frequency gravitational waves.
The findings have been printed on Thursday by a group of worldwide scientists, together with from Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) which used the Pune-based GMRT telescope.
“We are within a whisker of achieving such a dynamic range where one can finally listen to the bass sections in this cosmic gravitational-wave-symphony,” stated Pratik Tarafdar of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
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Such waves are anticipated to originate from numerous dancing monster black gap pairs, a number of million occasions heavier than the Sun, the scientists stated.
“It is fantastic to see our unique uGMRT data being used for the ongoing international efforts on gravitational wave astronomy,” stated Yashwant Gupta, Centre Director at National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune, which operates the GMRT.
The group’s outcomes are thought of as a vital milestone in opening a brand new, astrophysically-rich window in the gravitational wave spectrum.
Scientists of the European Pulsar Timing Array in collaboration with the Indo-Japanese colleagues of the InPTA arrived at the findings after analysing pulsar knowledge collected over 25 years with six of the world’s largest radio telescopes.
This contains greater than three years of very delicate knowledge collected utilizing the distinctive low radio frequency vary and the flexibility GMRT, which underwent vital upgrades in 2019.
“The results reported by the EPTA+InPTA collaboration are tantalisingly close to the discovery of nano-hertz gravitational waves and are the culmination of many years of efforts by many scientists including early career researchers and undergraduate students,” stated Prof. Shantanu Desai of IIT, Hyderabad.
The InPTA experiment concerned researchers from NCRA (Pune), TIFR (Mumbai), IIT (Roorkee), IISER (Bhopal), IIT (Hyderabad), IMSc (Chennai) and RRI (Bengaluru) together with their colleagues from Kumamoto University, Japan.
The 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany, the Lovell Telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom, the Nancay Radio Telescope in France, the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands have been used for observations.
