In a historic first, astronomers have detected low-frequency gravitational waves using a galaxy-sized antenna of millisecond pulsars in the Milky Way.
) in Canada, they collected data about the timing of those pulses every month for 15 years. Then, they calculated the difference between the pulses' actual arrival times and their predicted arrival times — which they could estimate within 1 microsecond, comparable to measuring the distance to the moon to within a thousandth of a millimeter, scientists say.
The much sought-after gravitational wave signals were embedded in those differences, Taylor said. This is the first time that scientists have found compelling evidence for such patterns of inconsistency etched by a backdrop of gravitational waves, whose effects on pulsars' light flashes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity back in 1916.An illustration of positions of Milky Way's pulsars included in NANOGrav's 15-year dataset.
"At one point, scientists were concerned that supermassive black holes in binaries would orbit each other forever, never coming close enough together to generate a signal like this," Luke Zoltan Kelley, who is an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and part of the NANOGrav collaboration, said in a statement.
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