Albert Einstein proposed in 1916 that the universe was constantly being pushed and stretched by space-time waves undulating throughout the universe. A group of scientists won the Nobel Prize for finding proof of these waves in 2016, using a laser interferometer to detect a high-frequency gravitational wave emanating from the collision of two black holes or neutron stars less than 100 times the mass of the sun.
It is much louder than previously believed possible and its discovery will alter our understanding of the universe.
Scientists have heard the “chorus” of gravitational waves emanating throughout the universe for the very first time, and it’s louder than they expected, a press statement reveals.
The new discovery was made by scientists using the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav).
Geoff Bennett:
Let’s expand our horizons a bit wider and look at important findings that are literally about space-time and the cosmos as we know it.
You might remember that Albert Einstein theorized that as heavy objects move through time and space, they create ripple effects in the fabric of our universe. Now an international team of scientists have detected new evidence of that. Researchers found new signs of gravitational waves, waves that are affected by huge movements, such as the collision of black holes.
Since the discovery of gravitational waves, scientists have been trying to understand the origin of merging black holes, and POSYDON may be the way to do it.
Black holes are some of the most fascinating celestial bodies in the universe. Their gravitational fields are so strong that even light cannot escape them. One of the ways in which they are formed is when a massive star collapses, resulting in a stellar-mass black hole.
In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) discovered gravitational waves (ripples through spacetime) from two colliding black holes. This groundbreaking discovery has prompted astrophysicists to study their origin and formation.
Year 2015 😗😁
Physicists in France have figured out how to optimise an advanced type of electric rocket thruster that uses a stream of plasma travelling at 72,420 km/h (45,000 mph) to propel spacecraft forward, allowing them to run on 100 million times less fuel than conventional chemical rockets.
Known as a Hall thruster, these engines have been operating in space since 1971, and are now routinely flown on communication satellites and space probes to adjust their orbits when needed. These things are awesome, and scientists want to use them to get humans to Mars, except there’s one — rather large — problem: the current lifespan of a Hall thruster is around 10,000 operation hours, and that’s way too short for most space exploration missions, which require upwards of 50,000 hours.
Hall thrusters work just like regular ion thrusters, which blast a stream of charged ions from an anode to a cathode (positively and negatively charged electrodes), where they get neutralised by a beam of electrons. This causes the elections to shoot one way, and the attached rocket to shoot another, propelling it forward.
For the first time, researchers using pulsar timing arrays have found evidence for the long-sought-after gravitational wave background. Though the exact source of this low-frequency gravitational wave hum is not yet known, further observations may reveal it to be from pairs of supermassive black holes orbiting one another or from entirely new physics at work in our universe.
A New Window onto Gravitational Waves
In 2016, researchers reported the first detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), opening a new window onto a universe’s worth of collisions between extreme objects like black holes and neutron stars. Though this discovery marked the beginning of a new observational era, many sources of gravitational waves remained beyond the reach of our current detectors on Earth.
A group of Chinese scientists has recently found key evidence for the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves, marking a new era in nanohertz gravitational wave research. The research was based on pulsar timing observations carried out with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).
The research was conducted by the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA) collaboration, which comprises researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and other institutes. Their findings were published online June 28 in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA).
Other international pulsar timing array collaborations will announce similar results in the same day.
It’s official. There’s something out there shaking the stars in a way that can no longer be ascribed to chance.
Several teams around the world have independently found a signal in the timing of flashing stars called pulsars that points to giant, long-wavelength gravitational waves rolling through the galaxy. It’s not quite a detection of those gravitational waves yet – but there is more than a 99 percent chance that what we’re looking at is something significant.
Teams in Australia, the US, Europe, China, and India are releasing their results simultaneously in a slew of papers.
The claim of a gravitational wave background suggests the universe is constantly roiled by violent events that happened over the past 13 billion years.
Do you ever mesh your other hobbies with the space stuff? Yes. I once turned the results of one of my experiments into a musical. In 2020, during the lockdowns, I put a scientific instrument on my balcony to measure light, sound and pollution before and after the pandemic. I ended up with several graphs and thought, Why not turn these into a musical? So, me and my brother got several musical instruments and played notes according to how high or low each point on the graph was. We actually submitted that to the NASA SpaceApps COVID-19 Challenge and became one of the top six global winners.
Do you think you’ll study space science at university when you’re older? I think so. Either aerospace or astrophysics, or maybe both.
Any other cool projects in the pipeline? Not right now, but I’m getting ready to go to Belgium this September, to represent Canada in the EU Contest for Young Scientists, which is an international science competition. I’ll be able to showcase this project there. But before then, I need to make a 10-page project report with figures, summaries and scientific documents. And I’ll need a poster!
