Update 29 June 2023: It's official! Scientists have detected the background hum of the Universe for the first time. You can read about the incredible breakthrough here.
Original article: The Universe should be humming.
Every supernova, every merger between neutron stars or black holes, even rapidly spinning lone neutron stars, could or should be a source of gravitational waves.
Even the rapid inflation of space following the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago should have produced its own cascade of gravitational waves.
Like a rock thrown in a pond, these massive events should send ripples reverberating through the very fabric of space-time – faint expansions and contractions of space that could be detectable to us as discrepancies in what should be precisely timed signals.Collectively, this mix of signals combines to form a random or 'stochastic' buzz known as the gravitational wave background, and it's one of possibly the most highly-sought detections in gravitational wave astronomy.
And there are hints that a development around this very subject may be imminent, with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) organizing a coordinated and global announcement on Thursday 29 June 2023.The update will shed light on research conducted by the International Pulsar Timing Array – a global consortium of gravitational wave detectors: North America's NANOGrav; the European Pulsar Timing Array; the Indian Pulsar Timing Array Project; and Australia's Parkes Pulsar Timing Array.
The new frontier in space exploration
It's thought – just as the discovery of the cosmic microwave background did before it (and continues to do) – that finding the gravitational wave background will blow our understanding of the Universe and its evolution wide open.
"Detecting a stochastic background of gravitational radiation can provide a wealth of information about astrophysical source populations and processes in the very early Universe, which are not accessible by any other means," explains theoretical physicist Susan Scott of the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery.
"For example, electromagnetic radiation does not provide a picture of the Universe any earlier than the time of last scattering (about 400,000 years after the Big Bang). Gravitational waves, however, can give us information all the way back to the onset of inflation, just ∼10-32 seconds after the Big Bang."
To understand the importance of the gravitational wave background, we ought to talk a little bit about another relic of the Big Bang: the cosmic microwave background, or CMB.
Moments after our Universe started ticking and space began to cool, the bubbling foam that was everything congealed into an opaque soup of subatomic particles in the form of ionized plasma.
Any radiation that emerged with it was scattered, preventing it from making it any great distance. It wasn't until these subatomic particles recombined into atoms, an era known as the Epoch of Recombination, that light could freely move through the Universe and on down through the eons.
The first flash of light burst through space around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and, as the Universe grew and grew in the following billions of years, this light got dragged into every corner. It's still all around us today. This radiation is extremely faint but detectable, particularly in microwave wavelengths. This is the CMB, the first light in the Universe.
The irregularities in this light, referred to as anisotropies, were caused by small temperature fluctuations represented by that first light. It's difficult to overstate how phenomenal its discovery was: the CMB is one of the only probes we have of the state of the early Universe.
The discovery of the gravitational wave background would be a magnificent replication of this achievement.
"We expect the detection and analysis of the gravitational wave background to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe," Scott says, "in the same way pioneered by the observation of the cosmic microwave background and its anisotropies."
International Conference on Gravitational Waves
visit:gravity.sfconferences.com
Nomination link: https://x-i.me/granom
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