This week, the Italian government indicated the territory of Lula (province of Nuoro) on the Tyrrhenian island as the ideal place to host the Einstein Telescope – a third-generation gravitational wave detector, capable of “observing” signals from the cosmos to shed light on the unresolved questions of cosmology, such as black holes to dark matter, all the way back to the Big Bang.

The project, worth €1.9 billion over nine years, will be funded by the EU and create an estimated 36,000 jobs to build the underground facility. Construction is slated to start in 2027. The Einstein Telescope will build on the success of other detectors based on laser interferometer technology, such as VIRGO (near Pisa, in Tuscany) and LIGO (in two areas of the US), whose discoveries of black holes and neutron stars have opened a new era in the study of astronomical gravitational waves.