Why This Universe?
79 - NanoGRAV's Big Gravitational Wave Discovery (Ft. Chiara Mingarelli)
Mar 18, 2024
The podcast explores NanoGRAV's groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves using pulsars, delves into the rarity and significance of gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers, discusses the unique nature of gravitational waves generated by these mergers, explores the utilization of pulsar timing arrays by NanoGRAV, and speculates on future breakthroughs in gravitational wave science including detecting supermassive black hole binary systems and the true nature of dark matter.
40:54
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Quick takeaways
- NanoGRAV discovered low frequency gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers using pulsars.
- Pulsar timing arrays like NanoGRAV track gravitational wave effects on pulsar pulses to detect black hole mergers.
Deep dives
Exploring Nanograph's Detection of Gravitational Waves from Pulsars
Nanograph, a consortium of astronomers, recently announced a significant discovery of a background of low frequency gravitational waves originating from slowly merging supermassive black holes. These massive entities, ranging from a hundred million to a billion solar masses, create strong gravitational waves that Nanograph was able to detect using pulsars distributed across the Milky Way. The detection of these low frequency gravitational waves introduces a new method to study the universe's most enormous black holes.
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