{"id":135979,"date":"2023-06-28T20:01:56","date_gmt":"2023-06-29T00:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=135979"},"modified":"2023-07-03T14:29:34","modified_gmt":"2023-07-03T18:29:34","slug":"ucf-researcher-is-part-of-team-that-has-discovered-first-compelling-evidence-for-low-frequency-gravitational-waves-in-the-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/ucf-researcher-is-part-of-team-that-has-discovered-first-compelling-evidence-for-low-frequency-gravitational-waves-in-the-cosmos\/","title":{"rendered":"UCF Researcher Part of Team That Discovered First Compelling Evidence for Low-frequency Gravitational Waves in the Cosmos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ateam of astrophysicists, including a UCF researcher, have discovered the first compelling evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves permeating the universe.<\/p>\n

The breakthrough was made by a collaboration of researchers, known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), who used large radio telescopes, like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to observe the timing of millisecond-period pulsars (MSPs).<\/p>\n

The MSPs, which are rapidly spinning dead stars that sweep beams of radio waves, appear to pulse when seen from Earth and allowed the researchers to detect gravitational wave background based on subtle changes in the arrival time of their signals.<\/p>\n

The results were published today in a series of five papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

First predicted in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravitational waves are \u201cripples\u201d through spacetime, and carry energy and information about their sources.<\/p>\n

The researchers refer to the gravitational wave background as a \u201chum\u201d that fills the universe with gravity signals spanning periods of years to decades. Studying these signals can provide a better understanding of the early universe and of the sources of the gravitational waves, such as the movement of massive black holes merging in the center of distant galaxies.<\/p>\n

Study co-author Bentege Perera<\/a>, a NANOGrav researcher and UCF scientist with Arecibo Observatory who is involved in timing these MSPs and characterizing their noise properties, says the overlap of all the gravitational wave signals produced by supermassive black hole binaries is one of the possible sources of forming this \u201chum\u201d that\u2019s in the low, nanohertz frequency.<\/p>\n

While earlier results from NANOGrav uncovered a puzzling timing signal common to all the pulsars they observed, it was too faint to reveal its origin. This 15-year data release, which includes high-precision timing of 68 MSPs monitored by the world\u2019s largest telescopes, demonstrated that the signal is consistent with slowly undulating gravitational waves passing through our galaxy.<\/p>\n