China begins building highest altitude telescopes in Tibet
BEIJING:
China has started construction of the world’s highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes in a Tibet prefecture close to Line of Actual Control with India to detect faintest echoes resonating from Universe, which may reveal more about the Big Bang theory.
The project will cost $18.8 million and the construction of the first telescope, codenamed Ngari No 1, 30 km south of Shiquanhe Town in Ngari Prefecture has begun, official media here reported. Nagri is the last Tibetan prefecture at China’s border with India.
The observatory is being built on a plateau 5,000 meters above sea level. It has been identified as one of the best places in the Northern Hemisphere for possibly observing primordial gravitational waves, state-run newspaper reported on Thursday.
The observatory is expected to be finished in five years. Gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 as part of his general theory of relativity, are generated when celestial bodies collide.
The advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in the US became the first to detect them in September 2015 when it picked up waves caused by the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. However, primordial gravitational waves, which the Tibet observatory will focus on, are believed to have been created about 13.8 billion years ago by the Big Bang, the explosion that scientists say created the Universe, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said. So far, primordial gravitational waves have never been detected. Electromagnetic radiation travels through space in light waves that are distinguished by varying wavelengths.
One of them, the submillimeter wavelength, will be key to finding primordial gravitational waves, Wang Junjie, an astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatories, part of the CAS said.