This Thursday, June 29, could already be dubbed a gravitational wave day. From International Pulsar Timing System (IPTA) have already announced that 17:00 UTC (19:00 UTC, Spanish Peninsular Time and 12:00 in Mexico) an announcement will be made about these waves, which may change history of astronomy. The entire international scientific scene is waiting with bated breath for the announcement. But also, since Chinese Pulsar Temporal Array (CPTA) just made another announcement: first time they met gravitational waves with a frequency of nanohertz.
This is what should have happened intuitively. Until now, however, astronomers have not had the technology sensitive enough to detect them. Now, thanks 500 m aperture spherical telescope (FAST)located in China, managed to find these gravitational waves.
This is very important because this discovery can help us better understand supermassive black holes and even obtain data that will also improve understanding of the fundamental physical laws of space-time. All of these are the benefits of this discovery, which serves as the starter to the big announcement in the history of gravitational waves.
What are gravitational waves?
Gravitational waves space-time perturbations which are formed under the influence of gravity explosive phenomena between very massive objects. These can be, for example, star explosions, neutron star collisions or black hole mergers.
Just eight years ago, the first gravitational waves were discovered. Several more have since been discovered, usually by a method based on pulsar observation. These are neutron stars formed after supernova explosionwhich rotate very quickly and are very magnetized. At the same time, they emit pulsating light with such precise periodicity that they are also called atomic clocks.
Precisely because their light flickers so precisely, any disturbance that causes them to spin faster can be detected by radio telescopes. These violations may be gravitational waves, which also have a periodicity, like any other wave. Other ways to detect them are currently being explored, but the most common is the use of pulsars.
What does its frequency tell us?
The wave frequency is how many times does it oscillate per unit time. In this picture you can see the difference.
This parameter is usually measured in hertz, so one hertz corresponds full cycle in one second. These hertz may have prefixes and suffixes indicating smaller or lower frequencies. For example, nanohertz represent one billionth of a hertz.
In the case of gravitational waves, how much the greater the mass of the object what caused outrage the lower its frequency. Therefore, it would be interesting to find those whose frequency is measured in nanohertz. Until now, this has not been possible, although recently it has been felt that with the advent of new tools, this will be a matter of time.
These scientists achieved this thanks to the high sensitivity of FAST, which is able to analyze pulsars with a frequency of only 57 milliseconds, 41 months. It is important to increase the time as it takes a long time to complete a full cycle due to its low frequency. Thus, by analyzing these small variations, they found fluctuations corresponding to gravitational waves with frequencies on the order of nanohertz.
All this has been confirmed standalone data processing softwareso that the results can be read with high level of trustwhere the probability of error is 1 in 2 million.
This will help to better understand how supermassive black holes are born, grow, develop and merge. Moreover, it could help information about the galactic merger and about the early stages of the early universe.
Big analysis ahead. But at the moment, these scientists have gone down in history. And that the big message about gravitational waves will arrive no sooner than in a few hours.
Source: Hiper Textual
