NANOGrav confirmed what had long been suspected—gravitational waves are thrumming throughout the universe, emitting a low-pitched symphony that distorts the fabric of space and time.
Tanmoy Laskar, assistant professor at the U’s Department of Physics & Astronomy thought of organizing the watch party to share in the excitement and discuss the results with the U community. He spoke with @TheU to explain the announcement.
Why is the astrophysics community so excited about the announcement?
This is very exciting because our current astrophysics and cosmology theories tell us that the universe should be full of these gravitational waves and, with these new results, the evidence for the existence of such a gravitational wave background just got much, much stronger. Furthermore, multiple global teams published their own, independent data sets on the same day and each team finds strong evidence for the presence of this gravitational wave background, which means that this signal is very likely real.
PHOTO CREDIT: TANMOY LASKAR
A live stream watch party for the NANOGrav announcement at the U.
How did the collaboration detect the gravitational waves?
Gravitational waves are essentially a small stretch and squeeze in space and time. This means that if we want to detect a gravitational wave going by, we need to measure small perturbations to the distance between free-floating masses or to the time difference between two freely falling clocks. But the gravitational wave background that was the focus of the new studies involves waves with extremely long wavelengths—dozens of light years. This means to detect them we need clocks or masses separated by similar distances.
To navigate this, NANOGrav and their sister experiments used a technique called pulsar timing. Pulsars are rapidly spinning, very dense stars packing the mass of our sun into the size of a small city. They were discovered in 1967 by Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell as extraterrestrial objects producing regular radio pulses. The radio pulses from pulsars tend to be extremely regular because they behave similar to lighthouses. If you look at a lighthouse from the shore, its rotating beam of light flashes towards you at regular intervals. In the same way, pulsars appear as regular radio pulses seen when their lighthouse-like radio beams periodically sweep past Earth.
Astronomers realized that an array of pulsars spread across our galaxy could be used as a network of clocks. By timing the arrival of the pulses from these pulsars, one could look out for passing gravitational waves that would disrupt the timing of radio pulses that would usually arrive like clockwork. Tracking a large number of pulsars for disruptions is much more reliable. The idea is that if a gravitational wave goes through, then not only will there will be offsets in the time of arrival of the pulses from each pulsar from their expected times, such effects will be correlated in a predictable fashion between different pulsars depending on each pulsar’s direction and distance from Earth.
Of course a lot of different effects still need to be accounted for, including the motion of the Earth and planets in the Solar System and the slowing down of each pulsar as it slowly loses energy. Not to mention the fact that these gravitational waves have wavelengths that correspond to several Earth years, meaning that the observations need to be collected for over a decade to make a discovery!
To read the full interview with Lisa Potter visit @TheU.