225 hectare Maharashtra land handed over for first LIGO project in India

The Hingoli revenue department has handed over 225 hectare of land here in Maharashtra to authorities of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project for setting up the first such facility in the country, a senior district official said.

There are currently a couple of such labs in the US – at Hanford in Washington and Livingston in Louisiana – which study the gravitational waves.

In 2016, the central government had given an ’in principle’ approval to the LIGO-India mega science proposal for research on gravitational waves.

The transfer of the land here for the project had earlier been put on hold for some time because of the COVID-19 pandemic, an official said.