The scientists pointed telescopes at dead stars called pulsars, which send out flashes of radio waves as they spin around in space like lighthouses. Other teams of gravitational wave hunters around the world also published studies, including in Europe, India, China and Australia. The results released this week included 15 years of data from NANOGrav, which has been using telescopes across North America to search for the waves. So “we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy,” said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lam of the SETI Institute. No instruments on Earth could capture the ripples from these giants. Those quick “chirps” come from specific moments when relatively small black holes and dead stars crash into each other, Mingarelli said. But so far, those methods have only been able to catch waves at high frequencies, explained NANOGrav member Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University. In 2015, scientists used an experiment called LIGO to detect gravitational waves for the first time and showed Einstein was right. Scientists sometimes liken these ripples to the background music of the universe. “It’s really the first time that we have evidence of just this large-scale motion of everything in the universe,” said Maura McLaughlin, co-director of NANOGrav, the research collaboration that published the results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.Įinstein predicted that when really heavy objects move through spacetime - the fabric of our universe - they create ripples that spread through that fabric. They reported Wednesday that they were able to “hear” what are called low-frequency gravitational waves - changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space. NEW YORK (AP) - Scientists have observed for the first time the faint ripples caused by the motion of black holes that are gently stretching and squeezing everything in the universe.
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