Hunting for gravitational waves from monster black holes
Our universe is a chaotic sea of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. Astronomers think waves from orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies are light-years long and have been trying to observe them for decades, and now they're one step closer thanks to NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.Fermi detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.
"We kind of surprised ourselves when we discovered Fermi could help us hunt for long gravitational waves," said Matthew Kerr, a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington."It's new to the fray -- radio studies have been doing similar searches for years. But Fermi and gamma rays have some special characteristics that together make them a very powerful tool in this investigation.
To find them, scientists need galaxy-sized detectors called pulsar timing arrays. These arrays use specific sets of millisecond pulsars, which rotate as fast as blender blades. Millisecond pulsars sweep beams of radiation, from radio to gamma rays, past our line of sight, appearing to pulse with incredible regularity -- like cosmic clocks.
Radio astronomers have been using pulsar timing arrays for decades, and their observations are the most sensitive to these gravitational waves. But interstellar effects complicate the analysis of radio data. Space is speckled with stray electrons. Across light-years, their effects combine to bend the trajectory of radio waves. This alters the arrival times of pulses at different frequencies.
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