After decades of searching, astronomers have found a distinctive pattern of light, from spinning stars called pulsars, that suggests huge gravitational waves are creating gentle ripples in space-time across the universe
that the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves , a US-based collaboration that began in 2007 and that uses a pulsar timing array, had detected this gravitational wave background using radio telescopes.
“They’re also starting to see this very characteristic correlation signal in their data,” says NANOGrav team member “We have to be able to account for all of them and that takes a long time,” says McKee. “It takes a lot of years of observations, it takes a lot of understanding the noise properties of spin irregularities, the interstellar medium, things like that.”It is only now that pulsar timing array teams feel confident enough in their data to be able to spot the distinctive pattern within the signal predicted by general relativity .
“It is inevitable that those [pairs of] supermassive black holes are going to be brought together, eventually, to form binaries,” says team member There is enough uncertainty in the NANOGrav signal that the door is open for alternative explanations, saysat Carleton College in Minnesota. “We’re going to have hundreds of papers from theorists in the coming days where they’re going to be presenting other models.”
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