Pulsar Timing Arrays

Today is the day.. they're finally announcing something new about pulsar timing arrays !!!

What's PTA you ask? Well.. a little insight on what PTA is, pulsar timing arrays use the spin period of a pulsar to detect gravitational waves, and pulsars are neutron stars that can rotate very rapidly. These spin periods can create a flash once per millisecond and even up to 1.000 flashes per second. And these flashes can be disrupted by ripples in space created by colliding black holes or neutron stars (these ripples are also gravitational waves). The way we can observe this is by looking at the time of when the flashes arrive to us, when a gravitational wave passes between us, it can disrupt these flashes, making it take a longer or shorter time to reach us.

On the topic of gravitational waves, astrophysicists were able to detect these gravitational waves before using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is a device made up of two enormous laser arms up to 4 kilometers each (2.5 miles if you're American..) that are perpendicular to each other, which may seem very big for earth standards, but is actually very little for universe standards, since we need lasers that are light-years away from us to detect even more precise gravitational waves, like low frequency ones. We were only able to detect larger gravitational waves made by black hole collisions using LIGO.

And now, this is how the pulsars will benefit us.

So back to the news that I was originally going to discuss... (･_･˘)

According to the International Pulsar Timing Array, they have been able to detect the Gravitational Wave Background in the universe, sending ripples through the vacuum of space for what can be described as sounds produced from said gravitational waves (basically in short our universe is "humming" or "singing" even! that's cool asf dont you think??). They've been observing up to 68 pulsars for about 15 years to detect this low frequency gravitational wave. Astrophysicists have not yet been able to pin point the source of this low frequency gravitational wave, one possibility is that these signals are coming from pairs of supermassive black holes.

And with the analysis of this so-called "hum" we can look further into how these supermassive black holes can grow and merge. According to NanoGRAV, the population of these supermassive black holes might be a lot more than what we may have originally expected, numbering in hundreds, thousands or perhaps even millions.

so eeeerm.. thats the end of my ramble on todays news about astrophysics, im really excited for whats to come in the future considering this method of physics to observe our universe is fairly new ^^ and ill leave a few links about the news at the end of the blog if my explanation wasnt that good lol

so... ill sign this post off with a goodbye and thank you for reading! :-)

(P.S. idk what to put the category as)

lmao