Gravitational waves: It’s all about extracting wave signal from noise, says scientist Sanjeev Dhurandhar

PUNE: The detection of gravitational waves is a big moment and an overwhelming one, said Sanjeev Dhurandhar, one of the key scientists involved in the announcement made at a US National Science Foundation news conference on Thursday.

The announcement of detection of gravitational waves or ripples produced by cosmic collisions of black holes is the first ever. The existence of such a wave was hypothesized by Albert Einstein in his famous Theory of General Relativity.

"In 1916, Einstein had thought that detection of these waves was extremely difficult, but technology has improved," said Dhurandhar. "But even after so many years, it is still a difficult task. The waves are very weak and one has to measure the distance between them."

Dhurandhar has worked on this subject since 1987. "The major component of my work is in the data analysis of gravitational wave signals embedded in the noise of the detector," he said. "The aim is to extract the signal from the noise. Signals are buried inside noise and extracting it involves a lot of mathematics and statistics," he added.

The professor emeritus at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) who loves mathematics and statistics joined the institute in 1989 "when no one believed in the concept on gravitational waves".

It was astrophysicist and IUCAA founder-director Jayant Narlikar who took Dhurandhar in.

"In the initial days there were very few people who researched in this field and they would be laughed at by others," said Somak Raychaudhury, director, IUCAA. "Narlikar brought Dhurandhar here at IUCAA specially to continue research in this field."

An alumnus of Pune's Fergusson College, Dhurandhar started his career with general relativity before the thermodynamics of blackholes sucked him in. "This is a huge announcement for the entire scientific community and just the beginning now for further discoveries and a new branch of astronomy," Dhurandhar said on Thursday's announcement.