IIT Gandhinagar, CMI researchers develop technique to detect undetected component of gravitational waves

A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) and Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) has detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes where one of them is much heavier than the other.

A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) and Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) has detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes where one of them is much heavier than the other.

These gravitational waves, named as GW190412, were produced by the inspiral and merger of two black holes with distinctly different masses and were observed by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, USA, and Virgo Collaboration, Italy.

The merger took place about 2 billion years ago when the Earth was probably teeming with unicellular life. The signals traveled through the expanding universe to arrive at the LIGO detectors on April 12, 2019. It took more than a year of meticulous analysis to verify the results of these gravitational waves.

It is for the first time that LIGO and Virgo detectors have detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes. The distinctly different masses of the black holes are about 8 and 30 times larger than that of the Sun.

It is also for the first time that fainter components (higher-harmonics) of the astrophysical gravitational wave signal, predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, have been detected in LIGO and Virgo data.

This has been detected by Soumen Roy, a Ph.D. student in Physics at IIT Gandhinagar, Professor Anand Sengupta, Associate Professor of Physics at IIT Gandhinagar, and Prof K G Arun from CMI Chennai, who jointly developed a new technique to extract faint cosmic signals to be better “heard” in the gravitational-wave emission.