After last week’s “Sardegna Regione Spaziale” conference, Cagliari remains at the center of the national scene. Yesterday, Monday, June 18, discussions focused on the detection of gravitational waves and the Italian project related to the Einstein Telescope, the underground detector whose potential location is being studied at the European level.
The meeting – held yesterday, Monday, June 18, at the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari, and attended via video message by the president of Inaf Nichi D’Amico – was characterized by anticipation for the site selection, which will occur in the coming years. The project coordinator for the Einstein Telescope in our country, Michele Punturo from Infn in Perugia, spoke about it. He is the most updated person in Italy on the project and the “behind the scenes” related to our competitors for the site selection. Sardinia is competing with very well-structured and politically strong alternatives, such as the Dutch project, which envisions a triangle with vertices in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Another competitor is Hungary, which has very low seismic activity.
If, as advocated by the entire Italian scientific community, the successor to Ligo and Virgo is eventually built in Sardinia, the impacts would be colossal. Besides an eight or nine-figure funding, there would be a significant narrative concerning the development of scientific tourism, which Inaf in Cagliari has been focusing on for years with ongoing work on the Sardinia Radio Telescope.
While the large dish of the San Basilio radio telescope has carved out a new niche in Sardinian reality, the Sos Enattos mine – the candidate site to host the Einstein Telescope, near Lula in the province of Nuoro – would represent the transformation of a world well-known to Sardinians, namely mining. The Sardinian Geomineral Park, a ministerial body aimed at organizing and promoting the development of areas once involved in mining activities, has been interested in Sos Enattos for many years to start underground visits, and the Einstein Telescope could be a great opportunity to relaunch the site also from a tourism perspective, although compatibility with observations would need to be studied very carefully.