Chiara Mingarelli: Hints of the Gravitational Wave Background from NANOGRAV! (#123)

Prof. Chiara Mingarelli is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist,
looking to understand how supermassive black holes in the centers
of massive galaxies merge, if at all. She does this by predicting
their nanohertz gravitational-wave signatures, which will soon be
detected by pulsar timing array experiments. With pulsar timing
data, She looks for both individual supermassive black holes in
binary systems, and for the gravitational-wave background which
should be generated by their cosmic merger history. She an
assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, and an
associate research scientist at the Center for Computational
Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute. Before joining the
CCA she was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at Caltech
and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. PRESS RELEASE:
In data gathered and analyzed over 13 years, the North American
Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has found
an intriguing low-frequency signal that may be attributable to
gravitational waves. NANOGrav researchers studying the signals from
distant pulsars – small, dense stars that rapidly rotate, emitting
beamed radio waves, much like a lighthouse – have used radio
telescopes to collect data that may indicate the effects of
gravitational waves, as reported recently in The Astrophysical
Journal Letters. NANOGrav has been able to rule out some effects
other than gravitational waves, such as interference from the
matter in our own solar system or certain errors in the data
collection. These newest findings set up direct detection of
gravitational waves as the possible next major step for NANOGrav
and other members of the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA),
a collaboration of researchers using the world’s largest radio
telescopes. “It is incredibly exciting to see such a strong signal
emerge from the data,” says Joseph Simon, lead researcher on the
paper. “However, because the gravitational-wave signal we are
searching for spans the entire duration of our observations, we
need to carefully understand our noise. This leaves us in a very
interesting place, where we can strongly rule out some known noise
sources, but we cannot yet say whether the signal is indeed from
gravitational waves. For that, we will need more data.”
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the
movements of incredibly massive objects, such as black holes
orbiting each other or neutron stars colliding. Astronomers cannot
observe these waves with a telescope like they do stars and
galaxies. Instead, they measure the effects passing gravitational
waves have, namely tiny changes to the precise position of objects
- including the position of the Earth itself. Support the podcast:
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