Astrophysicists from the so-called NANOGrav consortium have for the first time found convincing evidence of the existence of gravitational waves that oscillate with periods of years to decades. They were apparently created during the Big Bang.
The NANOGrav consortium, an association of more than 190 scientists, observes pulsars in our galaxy with large radio telescopes and searches for gravitational waves.
Pulsars rotate rapidly and send beams of radio waves through space so that they appear to pulsate when viewed from Earth. These waves could emanate from orbiting pairs of the most massive black holes in the entire universe: They are billions of times more massive than the sun and larger than the distance between the earth and the sun. The superposition of signals from many individual black hole pairs results in a diffuse gravitational wave background noise.
Future studies of this signal will open a new window on the gravitational wave universe and provide insights into the merging of gigantic black holes in distant galaxies, among other things.
