Gravitational Waves (GW)

GW are ripples in space-time that carry information about massive and/or violent astronomical events inaccessible to electro-magnetic astronomy. Detection of GW, 100 years after their prediction, was not only an important test of Einstein’s General Relativity theory, but it opened a new window of astronomy. The LIGO-India detector will immensely help the international community in this effort and provide a great platform for a multi-disciplinary collaborative mega-science project involving cutting-edge technology.

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)

The universe had a hot and highly isotropic past. It expanded and cooled, and those relic photons are coming to us from every direction, creating a cosmic microwave background at ~2.7K. Tiny fluctuations of the CMB temperature and polarisation embeds the history of the early universe, which were measured by the Planck mission to put precise constraints on the cosmological models and parameters.