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By Gabriel Popkin, Inside Science -- When leaders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced in February the first-ever direct detection of a gravitational wave, astrophysicists Scott Ransom from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Andrea Lommen at Franklin and Marshall University in Lancaster, Pennsylva
We live in a Universe full of galaxies, supermassive black holes, and violence. The violence is particularly relevant here, because every so often, these galaxies merge, and if they each contain a supermassive black hole, the gravitational wave "ripples" that get sent through space will literally shake and affect everything that's in them.
From their crushing gravity to the universe’s strongest magnetic fields, extremes of physics are the norm for neutron star.
LIGO confirmed the existence of gravitational waves in 2015, detecting one-time perturbations of spacetime from the merger of large black holes. There should be a background of gravitational waves permeating space due to other cataclysmic events in the cosmos, perhaps dating from the Big Bang. The NANOGrav consortium reports evidence from pulsar timing arrays that space is filled with such waves. Simulations suggest the cosmic gravitational wave background is likely caused by the merger of hundreds of thousands of supermassive black holes over the history of the universe.
A CSIRO team at Murriyang has been tracking millisecond pulsars for 18 years and say they have evidence supporting the existence of gravitational waves