For more than a quarter of a century, astronomers have been trying to detect the background noise emitted by the vortex of giant black holes, and now they have succeeded thanks to a new technique for detecting gravitational waves. This discovery opens a “new window into the universe.”

Cooperation that really gave results

Researchers have long wondered how supermassive black holes shaped the formation of the universe. They were also interested in what happened immediately after the Big Bang, as well as dark matter.

The answer to some questions has become closer thanks to discoveries made by researchers from several continents.

The results were released Thursday by a large-scale collaboration of radio telescopes from several sites on the moon, and researchers recorded this “vibration of the universe” with “clockwork precision.”

Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time. These waves, which travel at the speed of light, are created when massive bodies are accelerated through space and time.

Basically, gravitational waves are fluctuations in the curvature of space-time that propagate over a long distance from the point of formation.

Now a network of telescopes has detected signs of a much larger phenomenon in the fabric of space-time, and in this case we’re talking about gravitational waves generated by supermassive black holes, perhaps even millions of times the mass of the Sun.

These gravitational waves are colossal, tens of billions of kilometers long, and are discovered when studying dead stars that rotate very quickly.

Researchers talk about the “gravitational wave background” and shock waves generated by supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies, holes that collide and merge, distorting the space and time around them.

“For 15 years, we’ve wanted to find this low-frequency noise of gravitational waves bouncing off the universe and passing through our galaxy to measure space-time,” says Steven Taylor of Vanderbilt University. “I am happy to report that our work has paid off.

To detect these waves, scientists used a new “tool”: pulsars in the Milky Way. The peculiarity of these stars is that they have a mass at most twice the mass of the Sun, compressed into a sphere with a diameter of only a few tens of kilometers.

Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate rapidly and create enormous electromagnetic radiation along a narrow beam. Neutron stars are very dense and have short, regular rotations. Pulsars also rotate at 700 revolutions per second and send out regular radio signals with each revolution, like real natural clocks.

Gravitational waves

The discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO detector in 2015 confirms predictions made by Einstein in 1916, even he had long had serious doubts. The waves remained in the realm of theory until 2015, as physicists believed they were extremely difficult to observe. The warping of space caused by a gravitational wave is mega-tiny (100,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom).

The comparison most often made with these tiny detected vibrations is to the vibrations that occur on the surface of a lake if you throw a rock, but in this case the “rock” is a colossal amount of energy equivalent to the mass of several Soras. energy coming from two black holes that “waltz” around each other and then merge, all of this happening a billion light years from Earth. When two black holes merge, a fantastic amount of energy is dissipated, “shaking” space and time, just as a stone wobbles the surface of a lake into which you drop it.

A model of space-time

The space-time model combines three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time into a construct called the space-time continuum, where time plays the role of the fourth dimension. In the special theory of relativity, space and time are quantities that are internally related to each other, and therefore cannot be considered as separate entities. This concept upset many old theories when it appeared in the early 20th century, and also had an impact on philosophy, because until then time and space were considered absolute and had no connection to each other.

As Albert Einstein demonstrated in his general theory of relativity, the gravity of massive bodies deforms the “fabric” of space and time—and these celestial bodies move along trajectories determined by this geometry. His theory also predicted the existence of gravitational waves.

Sources: AFP, Washington Post, BBC, National Geographic