Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved 26 billion rupees (£353m) for the construction of LIGO-India, expected to be completed by 2030.
The facility has been designed as an exact copy of the twin gravitational wave observatories located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. The observatory is the fifth facility to join a global network of observatories focusing on detecting disturbances in space-time, known as gravitational waves.
LIGO-India will be built near the city of Aundha in the Indian state of Maharashtra.
"In a nutshell, it will add to our astronomical capabilities and will enable us to offer inputs and feedback not only to India but to rest of the world," Indian union minister Shri Jitendra Singh said at a briefing.
The process that guided the moving and merging of massive objects in space was first explained by Albert Einstein more than a hundred years ago as the probable cause of gravitational waves....