India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) was one of the world’s six large telescopes that played a key role in finding the first direct evidence of the inexorable vibrations of the universe’s structure, caused by very low-frequency gravitational waves.
The findings were published on Thursday by a team of global scientists, including India’s Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA), which used the Pune-based GMRT telescope.
“We are on the verge of achieving such a dynamic range that one can finally hear the bass sections in this cosmic symphony of gravitational waves,” said Pratik Tarafdar of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
Such waves are expected to come from a large number of dancing pairs of monster black holes, several million times heavier than the Sun, the researchers said.
“It’s fantastic to see our unique uGMRT data being used for ongoing international efforts in gravitational wave astronomy,” said Yashwant Gupta, center director of the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune, which operates the GMRT.
The team’s results are considered a major milestone in opening a new, astrophysically rich window into the gravitational wave spectrum.
Scientists from the European Pulsar Timing Array, in collaboration with Indo-Japanese colleagues from InPTA, made the findings after analyzing 25 years of pulsar data collected by six of the world’s largest radio telescopes.
This includes over three years of highly sensitive data collected using the unique low-frequency range and flexibility of GMRT, which underwent major upgrades in 2019.
“The results reported by the EPTA+InPTA collaboration are tantalizingly close to the discovery of nanohertz gravitational waves and are the culmination of many years of effort by many scientists, including early researchers and undergraduate students,” said Prof. Shantanu Desai of IIT. , Hyderabad.
The InPTA experiment involved researchers from NCRA (Pune), TIFR (Mumbai), IIT (Roorkee), IISER (Bhopal), IIT (Hyderabad), IMSc (Chennai) and RRI (Bengaluru) along with their colleagues from Kumamoto University, Japan.
The Effelsberg 100m radio telescope in Germany, the Lovell Telescope at 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 were used for the observations.
Read Now:Model of a human embryo derived from stem cells has been created in the lab
