Astronomers close in on new way to detect gravitational waves

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Several teams hope to use pulsars in the Milky Way to detect ripples in space-time made by distant supermassive black holes.

Supermassive black holes orbiting each other very closely are expected to produce gravitational waves.Astronomers could be on the verge of detecting gravitational waves from distant supermassive black holes — millions or even billions of times larger than the black holes spotted so far — an international collaboration suggests.

Xavier Siemens, a radio astronomer at Oregon State University in Corvallis and a leader of the North American group, agrees that the red noise is not yet a detection. “But it’s reassuring,” he says.The first direct detection of gravitational waves was achieved in 2015 by the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Louisiana and Washington state.

Astrophysicists think that most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre. When two galaxies merge, their central black holes eventually sink to the centre of the newly formed galaxy and begin to orbit each other. If they get close enough, they will emit intense gravitational waves.

Such changes should be revealed because, when local space is stretched, the periodic signals from a pulsar will take tens of nanoseconds more or less to reach Earth than they would have otherwise.Measuring these delays requires decades of painstaking data gathering, followed by weeks of number crunching on a supercomputer. And it relies on the bizarre physics of the neutron stars known as pulsars.

 

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