Black holes: LISA pathfinder holds the key

Theoretical cosmologists apprehend that delay in the launch of LISA pathfinder.

Theoretical cosmologists apprehend that delay in the launch of LISA pathfinder,which is being developed jointly by the US and European space agencies,will delay the validation of the scientific understanding about the working of the early stages of the Universe after the Big Bang.

Instruments like LISA will revolutionalise the theoretical studies on the early Universe with the huge data captured by them from space. However,at the moment it appears that LISA pathfinder will be launched only in 2017 and subsequently,LISA could take another decade to get operational to provide necessary data to validate the studies, Priyamvada Natarajan,a theoretical cosmologist with the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University,said on Wednesday. She was addressing a seminar here on Supermassive black holes in the Universe,chaired by noted theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose.

Pathfinder LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is slated to be the prototype to demonstrate the key technologies to be used in the future LISA mission. LISA has been conceptualised as three identical spacecraft orbiting in an ecliptic plane around the Sun,with all the three positioned at the corners of an equilateral triangle five million km on a side.

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Theoretical scientists have come out with the science behind the early universe. It is the technology behind the LISA that holds the key to reolutionalise our understanding or early universe and other developments related to black holes, Natarajan added.

This mission will use the laser interferometry in space to detect the gravitational waves that cannot be detected from the ground because of their weak strength. The scientific community has zeroed in on gravitational waves as one of key observational signatures of mergers of black holes to form supermassive black holes.

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