A team of scientists in Europe studying data collected over two decades has found compelling evidence of ultra-low-energy gravitational waves, the results of a study said Wednesday.
The results, including an analysis by astronomers at the University of Birmingham and Manchester, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, said that very low gravitational waves carry many of the best-kept secrets of the universe, including the formation of binary systems. of supermassive black holes and events that may have occurred when the universe began, just a few seconds ago.
Scientists from the European Pulsar Timing Array in collaboration with Indo-Japanese astronomers from the Indian Pulsar Timing Array have been searching for these signals using six of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Telescopes monitor radio waves from orbiting neutron stars, called pulsars.
Using the combined energies of 25 of these pulsars, the team has been able to create a galactic-size gravitational-wave detector that measures the exact arrival time of radio waves from pulsars.
As signals travel through space and time, the presence of gravitational waves affects their path, creating errors.
An unprecedented analysis of the data has revealed anomalies associated with the pattern of very frequent gravitational waves, waves that travel between one and ten years.
“The results presented today are the beginning of a new journey to the universe to reveal its secrets. Our analysis shows a well-known signal that has been going on for many years to monitor pulsars as if the clocks in space are moving and moving in space,” Professor Alberto Vecchio, University of Birmingham’s Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy. , said.
“Although we have not yet been able to confirm the existence of a very low frequency, the presence of a distinct signal in all pulsars in this series is consistent with what astronomers expected.” The European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) has compiled observations of 25-millisecond pulsars, based on more than 25 years of data taken by five major radio telescopes in Europe: the Lovell Telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom, the 100-m Effelsberg Radio in Germany, Nancay Radio Telescope in France, Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy and Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope in the Netherlands.
To complement this set, also 10 years of data obtained at the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope and the Indian Pulsar Timing Array are included in this analysis.
Dr Paul Brook, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, who has been heavily involved in EPTA’s research, said: “It has taken 25 years of EPTA and a lot of intensive research to finally see some evidence for the basis of gravity. . Although it was predicted by his whole theory of relativity, the fact that Einstein thought that gravitational waves were too quiet to be observed, shows the extent of the work.” The EPTA results are also consistent with the results of analyzes using data sets collected from different radio telescopes that monitor other pulsars in Australia (PPTA), North-American (NANOGrav), and the Chinese pulsar timing array collaboration that was also released on Wednesday.
The gold standard in physics for claiming a new phenomenon has been discovered is that the result of the experiment has less than a one in a million chance of occurring by chance.
The results reported by EPTA do not meet this gold standard, but work is already underway to combine data from four alliances – EPTA, InPTA, PPTA and NANOGrav – led by the International Pulsar Timing Array to create a group of more than 100 pulsars.
This joint effort will allow this goal to be achieved in the near future. “This new journey has only just begun,” said Professor Vecchio.
“Listening to the universe’s broadcasts with better telescopes that monitor the number of pulsars will reveal more surprises in the future,” he said.
(This article has not been edited by the Devdiscourse staff and was only created from an aggregate feed.)
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