Detecting gravity waves isn’t easy. But what if you had a really big detector for a long time? That’s what researchers did when they crunched 15 years’ worth of data from the NANOGrav data set. The data was collected from over 170 radio astronomers measuring millisecond pulsars as a way to potentially detect low-frequency gravity waves.
Millisecond pulsars spin fast and make them ideal for the detection of low-frequency gravity waves, which are difficult to detect. The bulk of the paper is about the high-powered data analysis for a very large data set.
The NANOGrav data set 75 covers 68 pulsars collected from 2004 to 2020. Instruments included the Arecibo Observatory (Arecibo), the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), and the Very Large Array (VLA). There was also additional data taken from existing sources.
Other than being an interesting piece of science, there probably isn’t much hacking going on in the area of sub-Hertz gravity wave detection. But we think if you can follow the hairy math in this paper, it might give you some tricks for fitting observed data to models. We think.
The trick here isn’t detecting just any old gravity waves, but the low-frequency kind. Even the ordinary dections take some advanced engineering.
Gravitational waves. Gravity waves was taken: they’re actually the waves you probably think about the most common, as in, a wave with gravity as the restoring force, like waves on an ocean.
So cork on a string.
https://xkcd.com/2048/
Yeah. Really easy to believe the result was accidentally invented by the massive amount of intervening analysis.
http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery/math/math07.gif
Gravitational wave and gravity wave are two completely different things. A little googling before writing an article would have helped.
This was poinred out previously to HaD when they made the same mistake in another article.
Seems learning is not their thing then.Or maybe it’s against journalist-union rules?
Gravitontal waifs, perhaps?
B^)
“Please Sir, can I have more gravitons?”
“But we think if you can follow the hairy math in this paper, it might give you some tricks for fitting observed data to models. ”
Schrรถdinger’s math where the answer is, maybe.
If wormholes exist there should be gravity waves leaking through them that are detectable too, areas of space showing evidence of mass dynamics that cannot be explained by the visible content of that region of space.
“Even the ordinary dections take some advanced engineering.”
Hmmm… dections > detections ?
A problem of capitalization and suffixes.
DECtians (people that used to work on DEC computers and peripherals)
Or
DECTians (people who work on digital telephones)
Glad to be of service ๐.
Very nice you are. Good?