Scientists' recent detection of low-frequency gravitational waves may shed light on what's causing a constant rumble of ripples in the very fabric of space and time.
) starting in 2015, but the thing is, those involved higher-frequency, shorter-wavelength gravitational waves from different kinds of sources such as stellar mass black holes.
That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe. "That's when they were pumping out these big, massive gravitational waves and losing their energy so that eventually, they're going to collide," Ransom said."But we didn't know how many of these supermassive black hole binaries there were, and we didn't know how massive they were, and all of that determines when you're going to finally detect gravitational waves.
"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com."For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what’s producing the gravitational wave background.
Compounding this cosmic mystery is the fact that there are other teams on the case with more exotic suspects for low-frequency gravitational wave emitters in mind. Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav.
"In my mind, it’s a win-win. If the background is cosmological, it will completely transform our understanding of the universe and of fundamental physics - potentially one of the biggest discoveries in the history of science," Zoltan Kelley continued.
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