Springboarding off yesterday's post, about a mysterious flare-up of Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy), today we have an even more momentous discovery -- a background thrum of gravitational waves from supermassive black holes in orbit around each other.
Gravitational waves are created when massive objects accelerate through space. They're actually pulsed fluctuations in the fabric of space-time that propagate out from the source at the speed of light. The idea has been around for a long time; English mathematician Oliver Heaviside proposed them all the way back in 1893. Once Einstein wrote his paradigm-overturning paper on relativity in 1915, Heaviside's proposal gained a solid theoretical underpinning.
The problem was detecting them. They're tiny, especially at large distances from the source; and the converse difficulty is that if you were close enough to the source that they were obvious, they'd be big enough to tear you to shreds. So observing from a distance is the only real option.
The result is that it took a hundred years to get direct evidence of their existence. In 2015 the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) successfully detected the gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes. The whirling cyclone of energy as they spun around their center of mass, then finally coalesced, caused the space around the detector to oscillate enough to trigger a shift in the interference pattern between two lasers. The physicists had finally seen the fabric of space shudder for a moment -- and in 2017, the accomplishment won the Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish.
Now, though, a new study at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has found a whole different kind. Instead of the sudden, violent, there-and-gone-again waves seen by LIGO, NANOGrav has found a background "hum" in the universe -- the stirring of spacetime because of the orbiting of supermassive black holes around each other.
The accomplishment is made even more astonishing when you find out how long the wavelengths of these waves are. Frequency is inversely proportional to wavelength, so the "nanohertz" part of the name of the observatory might have given you a clue. The gravitational waves detected by NANOGrav have wavelengths measured in light years. So how in the hell do you detect a wave in which -- even traveling at the speed of light -- the trough of the wave doesn't hit you until a year after the crest?
The way they did it is as clever as it is amazing. Just as you can see a pattern of waves if you look across the surface of a pond, the propagation of these gravitational waves should create a ripple in space that affects the path of any light that travels through them. The scientists at NANOGrav measured the timing of the light from pulsars -- the spinning remnants of collapsed massive stars, that because of their immense mass and breakneck rotational speed flash on and off with clocklike precision. And sure enough, as the waves passed, the contraction and expansion of the fabric of space in between caused the pulsars to seem to speed up and slow down, by exactly the amount predicted by the theory.
"The Earth is just bumping around on this sea of gravitational waves," said astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin, of West Virginia University, who was on the team that discovered the phenomenon.
It's a little overwhelming to think about, isn't it? Millions of light years away, two enormous black holes are orbiting around a common center of gravity, and the ripples that creates in the cosmic pond flow outward at the speed of light, eventually getting here and jostling us. Makes me feel very, very small.
Which, honestly, is not a bad thing. It's always good to remember we're (very) tiny entities in a (very) large universe. Maybe it'll help us not to take our day-to-day worries quite so seriously.
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