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Astronomers Detected Gravitational Waves. Now They Want to See the Cosmic Ocean - Gizmodo
Jan 13, 2021 53 secs
Since then, scientists have picked up more gravitational waves produced by massive smash-ups, but they’ve also been looking for ways to see the so-called gravitational wave background.

Using the radio wave pulses from the Milky Way’s pulsars in an array, the team effectively conjured a galaxy-sized network of detectors for low-frequency gravitational waves, generated by the orbits of supermassive black holes rather than their collisions.

The gravitational background the team searches for would appear as more of a constant, jumbled murmur in space-time than an isolated blip like the one detected by LIGO in 2016.

A gravitational wave background would affect the light we see from the pulsars based on each one’s location and relative position, and a certain correlated pattern in changes to that light would indicate a gravitational wave background.

The waves the team documents have much longer wavelengths than the gravitational waves detected by LIGO in 2016, so the research progress has been gradual.

Ransom likens the gravitational waves to waves in the ocean of space-time, coming from different sources near and far.

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