wp-plugin-hostgator domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114ol-scrapes domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Source:https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/an-enormous-gravity-hum-moves-through-the-universe-20230628\/#comments<\/a><\/br> Most likely, the gravitational waves come from pairs of supermassive black holes that are spiraling around each other inside merging galaxies. But we might be seeing something else entirely, perhaps something exotic such as ruptures in space-time itself resulting from loops of energy called cosmic strings.<\/p>\n \u201cFinding for the first time the suggestion of background gravitational waves is fascinating,\u201d said Juan Garc\u00eda-Bellido, a theoretical cosmologist from the Autonomous University of Madrid who was not involved in the work. \u201cIt\u2019s really Nobel Prize-winning research.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s two ways to start the story of this discovery. The first, as usual, is with Albert Einstein. His general theory of relativity in 1915 suggested that the universe is an ocean of space-time on which objects like black holes and stars sit. Movements of these objects would send ripples across this space-time ocean \u2014 gravitational waves.<\/p>\n The other place to start the story is in 1967, with a graduate student from Lurgan, Northern Ireland, named Jocelyn Bell. Using a radio telescope that she helped build near Cambridge, U.K., she spotted an unusual signal in space<\/a> that repeated every second. She and other astronomers later classified these signals as a new class of celestial object known as pulsars \u2014 the rapidly spinning cores of dead stars. Today, some are known to spin exceedingly fast, emitting regular pulses of radio waves hundreds or even thousands of times per second.<\/p>\n The stopwatch-like regularity of pulsars makes them valuable cosmic timekeepers. In 1983, the U.S. astronomers Ron Hellings and George Downs suggested a novel way to put them to use: If gravitational waves were squeezing and stretching space-time, that motion would change the arrival time<\/a> of the pulsars\u2019 radio flashes.<\/p>\n The key is to look at many pairs of pulsars and compare their time delays. \u201cIf they\u2019re close together on the sky, they\u2019re both going to be early or late,\u201d said Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and chair of NANOGrav\u2019s Gravitational Wave Detection Working Group. \u201cAs you pull them apart, they become out of sync, but in a way you can predict.\u201d<\/p>\n To catch these fluctuations, pulsar timing arrays such as NANOGrav use multiple radio telescopes to observe many pulsars over many years. These projects are cosmic cousins of LIGO and other earthbound observatories that detect gravitational waves<\/a> by looking for tiny changes in the relative lengths of its two arms.<\/p>\n While LIGO\u2019s arms are each four kilometers long, pulsar timing arrays effectively use the distance from Earth to each pulsar as a much larger arm \u2014 one hundreds or thousands of light-years in length. \u201cWhat we\u2019ve essentially done is hack the entire galaxy to make a giant gravitational wave antenna,\u201d Taylor said.<\/p>\n This longer distance makes pulsar timing arrays sensitive to a different variety of gravitational wave. Whereas LIGO can detect high-frequency gravitational waves, which might occur when star-size black holes orbit each other tens or hundreds of times a second before merging, pulsar timing arrays are sensitive to processes occurring across years or even decades. That\u2019s one reason why pulsar timing arrays need many years of data \u2014 if it takes a decade for a single wave to pass by, you can\u2019t detect it in just a few months.<\/p>\n Of the four groups releasing data today, NANOGrav is the most confident in its result. The project was founded in 2007 and has largely used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico (which collapsed in late 2020<\/a>, near the end of NANOGrav\u2019s 15 years of data collection). \u201cWe\u2019re still mourning the loss of Arecibo,\u201d Taylor said.<\/p>\n Separate pulsar timing array projects were also established in different parts of the globe. The four teams, which together form the International Pulsar Timing Array, coordinated today\u2019s announcements, but they have not yet performed a combined data analysis. \u201cIt\u2019s complex,\u201d said Andrew Zic, an astronomer at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia and part of that country\u2019s Parkes Pulsar Timing Array team. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to move towards being a more unified thing.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2020, NANOGrav released preliminary data from 12.5 years of observations. Those showed a tentative hint of gravitational waves<\/a> affecting the pulses of some 45 pulsars.<\/p>\n Now they\u2019ve added a few more years of data, along with data from nearly two dozen more sources, and a more consistent pattern has emerged. \u201cIt really jumps out to us,\u201d Vigeland said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re looking at deviations in time that are a couple of hundred nanoseconds,\u201d said Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a founding member of NANOGrav. They\u2019ve detected a particular pattern in the data, called the Hellings-Downs curve, that makes them confident that what they\u2019re seeing is the gravitational-wave background. \u201cThat\u2019s the smoking gun of gravitational waves.\u201d<\/p>\n The European team, which observed 25 pulsars over 25 years with six telescopes, sees similar hints of timing delays but is less certain of their results. \u201cThe Americans are very confident,\u201d said Michael Keith, an astrophysicist at the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics and part of the European team. The Australian team is reporting observations from 32 pulsars over 18 years, while the Chinese team has observed 57 pulsars for a little more than three years.<\/p>\n
\nAn Enormous Gravity \u2018Hum\u2019 Moves Through the Universe<\/br>
\n2023-06-29 21:58:06<\/br><\/p>\nA Galaxy-Size Hack<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Supermassive Dances<\/strong><\/h2>\n