Catching Gravitational Waves With A Galaxy-sized Net Of Pulsars
- Creators
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Taylor, Stephen R.
Abstract
Until recently, the only way to observe the Universe was from light received by telescopes. But we are now able to measure gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of the Universe predicted by Albert Einstein. If two very dense objects (like black holes) orbit each other closely, they warp space and send out gravitational waves. For black holes that are similar in mass to the Sun, scientists use the LIGO detector on Earth. But for the biggest black holes in the Universe (billions of times more massive than the Sun), scientists monitor a net of rapidly-spinning neutron stars (called pulsars) across the Milky Way. Any gravitational wave passing by will change how long radio signals from these pulsars take to get to Earth. The NANOGrav Collaboration monitored 34 of these pulsars over 11 years, in an attempt to detect gravitational waves from giant black holes.
Additional Information
© 2019 Taylor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Submitted: 07 December 2018; Accepted: 23 May 2019; Published online: 07 June 2019. ST is funded by the NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center, which is supported by NSF award number 1430284. The Green Bank Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The Arecibo Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by the University of Central Florida in alliance with Yang Enterprises, Inc. and Universidad Metropolitana. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 98947
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190930-110955087
- PHY-1430284
- NSF
- Created
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2019-09-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR