“This can be understood by thinking about a huge orchestra tuning up their instruments: you know it’s an orchestra, and know there are many instruments, but can’t necessarily make one out specifically. “The papers describe the evidence as arising from a ‘gravitational wave background,’ which refers to the indiscernible signals coming from many sources of gravitational waves in the universe,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, assistant professor at WVU, who founded NANOGrav’s Astrophysics Working Group in 2011. “The universe is not static and never changing - we are awash in a space that is constantly stretching and squeezing.”Ī series of papers on NANOGrav’s findings and observations has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “NANOGrav and its international partners have discovered the first evidence for a background hum of gravitational waves,” McLaughlin said. She is also a member of the international team of scientists collaborating globally on the International Pulsar Timing Array project. Maura McLaughlin, Eberly Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and director of the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, was a founding member of the NANOGrav collaboration and serves as co-director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center. Of the 95 authors documenting this evidence in newly published papers, 30 are associated with WVU, including 11 authors currently at the University and 19 from past years, generally those trained as undergraduate students, graduate students or postdoctoral researchers. This result emerged from 15 years of data acquired by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, which includes many researchers from the WVU Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology. These low-frequency oscillations happen with periods of years to decades and were recognized through high-precision timing of cosmic radio clocks called pulsars. The first evidence for these ripples at very low frequencies was identified by a cohort of nearly 200 scientists from the United States and Canada. Gravitational waves travel outwards from a source at light speed, stretching and squeezing the very fabric of spacetime - for instance, making the length of a ruler longer or shorter, or making time tick a little faster or slower as the wave passes. More than two dozen researchers with ties to West Virginia University have helped unearth evidence of ripples in spacetime that have never been observed before now.
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