Scientists have announced the tentative detection of ultra-low frequency gravitational waves which could offer insights into some of the hardest-to-study bits of the universe
The culprits are gravitational waves, which are to gravity as radio waves or visible light are to electromagnetism. In 2015 gravitational waves were directly observed for the first time., an American observatory based in Washington state in that country’s north-west, and Louisiana in the south-east, detected waves produced by a pair of colliding black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun.
But the latest result concerns waves with frequencies in the nanohertz range, billions of times lower still. To detect those, astronomers must rely on light pulses created by Mother Nature—specifically, by pulsars. These are collapsed, spinning stars that emit flashes of light with metronomic regularity. If a passing gravitational wave distorts a region of spacetime between the pulsar and Earth, then some pulses would arrive earlier or later than expected.
None of the collaborations believe they have quite enough evidence for a conclusive discovery just yet. Physicists measure the significance of a result using a statistical term called sigma. A score of 5, the gold standard, indicates a roughly 1-in-3.5m chance that what seems like a result is instead the product of chance. Individually, the four detections have sigma values between 2 and 4.6. But combining their data could take them over the 5-sigma mark within a year.
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