‘Gravitational Waves Symposium’ held

Islamabad

A symposium on Gravitational Waves was held at Institute of Space Technology (IST), the event was first of its kind, to be held anywhere in Pakistan after the discovery of waves.

It has been a century since Einstein first predicted existence of the gravitational waves as one of the consequences of general relativity. But their direct detection did not come about until last year, when LIGO detectors finally received the signal from merging black holes some billions of miles away.

Dr Farrukh Chishtie, Professor and Head of Space Science Department at IST initiated the event by welcoming and thanking all the participants. The opening talk was presented by Dr Hamid Saleem, ex-DG of National Center for Physics, and presently a professor at IST. It was an introduction to light and how it bears messages from worlds farther away from own. Later, the ideas of general relativity and the significance of Gravitational Waves were put in place by Dr Abid H. Mujtaba, a mathematical and computational physicist at COMSATS Islamabad.

More than 180 participants from universities across Pakistan, attended the sessions. They spanned diverse fields including engineering, medicine and remote sensing. Their intense discussions followed the questions with the guest speakers.

The entire story of the discovery was presented by Dr Asghar Qadir, awarded Hilal-i-Imtiaz and Sitara-i-Imtiaz by government of Pakistan. He narrated that in 1990s he proposed an interferometer 2 sq.km across for Gwadar. The proposal was initially accepted but, unfortunately, it could never be realized. Had it been constructed, Pakistan would have a name in gravitational astronomy too.

Another distinguished speaker was Mansoor Ahmed, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. He served the Hubble Space Telescope Programme and was part of James Web Telescope. He described the engineering challenges for LIGO and future missions for working with GWs.

Among other speakers were Dr Aquib Moin, who has affiliations with University of Johannesburg, the Fermi-LAT collaboration at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre and LIGO EM Follow-up Group. He shed a light on how a holistic description of events like gamma ray bursts can be achieved with the information bearing GWs.

Dr Fazeel Khan, an assistant Professor at IST, discussed the dynamics of galaxy mergers and how gravitational waves are possible during such events. Dr. Asad Ali, another professor from IST, in his talk elaborated on the various statistical and mathematical aspects of signal processing involved in gravitational wave detection.

In his talk, Dr Farrukh Chishtie, head of Space Science Department, highlighted the importance of studying pulsars as another important avenue of gravitational wave astronomy.

One aspect that the symposium highlighted is the increasing interest of young minds towards astronomy and astrophysics. However, the field remains largely unidentified across the country.

The event was also streamlined live via Youtube channel, “Gravitational Waves Symposium”, to make access possible for everyone, everywhere.

As Dr Asghar coined it, detection of Gravitational Waves has been declared as the “Discovery of the Century”.

At the end of symposium, the scientific community has resolved to initiate an Astronomical and Astrophysics Society. The forum will provide a platform to people from astrophysics and other fields of astronomy to grow and interact.

As the scientists win $3million for the discovery, it is point to ponder where Pakistan stands in field of astronomy.