Did this Indian scientist predict gravitational waves thirty years ago?

New Delhi: Even as the world, particularly the scientific community, is abuzz with the news of gravitational waves discovery, there's one scientist who is not so astonished with the finding.

 

That's not because he doesn't have interest in astrophysics or in space, perhaps it is being claimed that he had predicted the very same theory three decades ago.

As per the Huffingtonpost.in report, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, a scientist with the Inter-University Centre of Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, had detected the gravitational waves almost thirty years ago before the international scientific community.

“I started my career by studying general relativity and was very interested in the thermodynamics of blackholes. My research interest since 1987 has been in the detection/observation of gravitational waves, their data analysis and the modelling of gravitational wave detectors,” Dhurandhar was quoted as saying.

Dhurandhar, who was one of the 1,000 key scientists involved in detecting the gravitational waves, suggested the existence of these weak waves as early as 1980s, but the scientific community was not very receptive then.

In 1989, he was brought into IUCAA, Pune to help develop techniques for the detection of the signals.

According to the Indian Express, he led the only Indian group in the 'initial era of the LIGO' - a large-scale physics experiment to detect gravitational waves - for a decade.

 

In total, more than 60 Indian scientists played a major role in the histotic discovery.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had lauded the role of Indian scientists in the scientific breakthrough.

 

Scientists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), announced on Thursday that they have detected the gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.