LIGO-India Breaks Ground as the Fifth Gravitational-Wave Observatory
Construction began April 23, 2026 in Maharashtra on a detector identical to LIGO's, which will sharpen sky positions for merging black holes.
LIGO-India broke ground on April 23, 2026, at Aundha in the Hingoli district of Maharashtra, India. It will be the fifth observatory in the global gravitational-wave network. The LIGO Laboratory announced the start of construction the same day.
The detector is funded by the Indian government and sits on a 174-acre site chosen for its low seismic noise, since ground vibrations are a major source of interference for these instruments. It will be identical in design to the LIGO detectors at Hanford and Livingston: an Advanced LIGO interferometer with two arms, each 4 kilometers long. Lasers bounce along the arms, and a passing gravitational wave changes their lengths by a tiny amount. Caltech and the LIGO Laboratory are providing key interferometer components, designs and training.
LIGO’s two US detectors made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. LIGO-India will join LIGO, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan to form a true worldwide array (LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA). Location is the point. A detector far from the existing sites adds a long new baseline, which sharply improves how precisely a merger can be pinned on the sky. Telescopes need that precision to catch the light from events such as neutron star collisions before it fades. The recent GWTC-5.0 catalog shows how much a third detector already helps localization; a fourth and fifth push further. Construction has only just begun, and the detector will take years to build and commission. More in our gravitational waves guide.
What to watch next: construction milestones at the Aundha site.
Primary source
This summary is based on LIGO Laboratory (Caltech). Read the original for full details, data and caveats.
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