“There’s nothing in nature that can mimic this.… Only gravitational waves can make that.”
While LIGO picks up gravitational wave blips that can last mere fractions of a second, orbiting supermassive black holes are expected to pump out waves continually for millions of years, creating ripples that blanket the cosmos with their constant hum. “This is a very different sort of thing, very new sort of thing,” says LIGO researcher Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. “That is awesome.
“The Earth is just randomly bumping around on this sea of gravitational waves,” says astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University in Morgantown and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav. To ensure that they were seeing the gravitational waves, rather than uninteresting jitters, the researchers looked for a special type of correlation between different pulsars. Pulsars near one another on the sky should show similar timing shifts, but those that are at right angles to one another should observe opposite shifts: One pulsar’s blips come early while the other’s come late.
The EPTA team spent an even longer time staring at pulsars — a quarter of a century. “We were getting to the point where we were starting to think maybe the signal is just so weak, we’ll never ever find it,” Keith says.
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