By: Nick Gambino
Scientists have recorded gargantuan rattles in space that most likely come from gravitational waves of a size that is nearly incomprehensible. This is not the first detection of such waves, originally theorized by Albert Einstein.
In 2015, researchers used ground-based detectors to record these galactic space jiggles. Those rumbles were most likely from two black holes merging into each other. The new find in 2023 is on a much more massive scale.
It’s thought these lower-frequency gravitational wave rumbles in space emanate from a ton of gargantuan black holes that are possibly millions or billions times bigger than our sun. These black holes from another galaxy have met up, swirled together in some sort of dance and collided into each other, producing these pulses that have reached as far as our galaxy.
You have to upscale everything when you’re thinking about these space productions. It’s not like these rumbles were created in the last couple months. The dance of the many black holes probably occurred decades ago and is only now detectable in our sphere.
“We can tell that the Earth is jiggling due to gravitational waves that are sweeping our Galaxy,” Scott Ransom who’s an astrophysicist at NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves), the organization that conducted the research and published the findings. “We’re not using the ‘d’ word for detection yet, but we do think this is strong evidence.”
The research stretched 15 years whereby many scientists studied the distant skies, recording regular pulsars that would go off at predictable times. NANOGrav conducted the study with the European Pulsar Timing Array and the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array which is in Australia. There are a number of other organizations like the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array who have released their own research as well.
Einstein theorized or even predicted gravitational waves as early as 1916 and it took a century to gather any sort of evidence of these large-scale galactic events. Since then there have been numerous additional recordings, but what we have now is on a whole new frequencey, suggesting a much larger sized event.
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