In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted that interactions between immensely dense objects in the universe, like two orbiting black holes, would emit waves that would literally bend space and time. He called them gravitational waves.
It wasn’t until nearly 100 years later, in 2015, that the existence of these waves was confirmed. Last month, scientists from around the globe coordinated the publishing of researchthat shows gravitational waves to be more ubiquitous than previously thought.
“Our results show for the first time that we have evidence for what we call the gravitational wave background, which is really a symphony of gravitational waves, from all different directions in the universe,” said Jeffrey Hazboun, assistant professor of physics at Oregon State, and USU alum.
Hazboun was a researcher on the North American based team, called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, working on the project. He said the team measured gravitational waves using dying stars called pulsars that act as cosmic clocks. These pulsars emit consistent blips of radio waves.
If you think of spacetime as a block of jelly, when gravitational waves pass between the pulsars and earth they bend that block of jelly, which in turn delays or hastens the time it takes for that pulsar radio wave to reach the scientists on Earth. In this way the team was able to detect gravitational waves.
Hazboun said the next step of this research is to determine where these waves are coming from. He said black holes are possible sources, but so are gravitational waves that have their origins at the very beginning of the universe.
There's a lot of different types of new physics that this could be. So, there's a lot of sources from the early universe. So, right after the Big Bang, inflation, other things that happen really early in the universe could cause these types of gravitational waves as well, at these really low frequencies. So, we don't know, and that's one of the other really exciting things about this.
