Specifically, they turned to pulsars, a type of neutron star that spins incredibly fast. Given that no human-made detector could ever possibly be that massive, scientists turned to the stars. “Detecting such gargantuan gravitational waves requires a similarly massive detector, and patience.” “These are by far the most powerful gravitational waves known to exist,” codirector of the NANOgrav Physics Frontiers Center Maura McLaughlin said in a press release. We haven’t found most of the gravitational waves, and those big, long ones that would come from every gravitational wave source not quite ready to merge should be just all over the place. A single wavelength of a gravitational wave can stretch lightyears in length, and we just haven’t been able to pick those up yet. First discovered in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, gravitational waves are physical ripples in spacetime caused by objects with mass moving through space, and they’re one of our best potential windows into mysteries like dark matter and supermassive black holes that we can’t see through more “traditional” means of space observation.īut we want to be able to detect the rest of the wavelengths, too. We’ve known about gravitational waves for a while. They made the first detections of what? Fair question, especially if you haven’t, in fact, been extremely tuned in to physics and astronomy Twitter. Scientists from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have officially made the first detections of the gravitational wave background. If you’ve been extremely tuned into physics and astronomy Twitter over the last few days, you’ve probably seen just about every relevant researcher and science communicator freaking out about a world-changing announcement coming just around the corner. This will open up a whole new way to explore our universe, allowing us to probe everything from galaxy formation to supermassive black holes in a whole new way-and, just maybe, fill in some of the gaps in the Standard Model.After a 15-year-long study, the scientists have finally “heard” what they were looking for: the gravitational waves that should be filling the universe.Researchers just announced the discovery of the gravitational wave background.
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