Los Gravitational waves They can be understood in some sense as folds of spacetime that propagate at the speed of light. A different type of radiation than electromagnetic or mechanical sound waves, because everything in space is distorted by the influence of these waves, including us, crossing the galaxy, even if we don’t realize it.
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For decades, scientists have assumed that these waves travel at different frequencies, and they were the first discovery by the collaboration LICO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Laboratory), In 2015, according to Alexander Bonilla, it proved its existence from very specific sources.
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Bonilla Rivera holds a degree in Physics from the National Pedagogical University of Colombia, a Masters in Astrophysics from the University of Valparaíso (Chile), and a PhD in Physics from the Federal University of Juís de Fora (Brazil). 190 scientists in the world who are part of the collaboration NanogravityProfessor at the University of El Bosque and Postgraduate at the National Laboratory in Rio de Janeiro.
Bonilla is an expert in gravitational and orbital cosmology and was part of the astrophysics interpretation team, where he participated in the project’s statistical analysis, writing publications with results, discussion of results, and other processes.
Today, scientists North American Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Laboratory (NANOGrav)From the Center for Frontiers in Physics, they brought world evidence that these waves exist at lower frequencies as well.
Bonilla was one of the experts participating in this international collaboration that used subsidized radio telescopes. US National Science Foundation (NSF) — including the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, a much larger array in Socorro, New Mexico, and the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico — to use an array of luminous stars rotating hundreds of times per second as gravitational waves to detect waves. Forces on a galactic scale.
These are called exotic stars Millisecond pulsesAs the remnants of massive stars run out of fuel and spin, their radio light beams are seen by researchers as more regular pulses or ticks, like a beacon or highly accurate cosmic clocks.
Those pulses are the key to this discovery. As Nanograve scientists describe in a report, Gravitational waves stretch and contract space-time in a unique way, creating changes in the interval between pulses emitted by stars., as they changed the rhythm of turning on and off the light of that galactic beacon. To find out, they had to compare data from 68 pulsars observed in our galaxy over 15 years with radio telescopes.
According to Dr. Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University and co-director of NanoGraph, a titanic task: “In fact, Pulsars are the weakest sources of radio“So we need thousands of hours of observations per year using the world’s largest telescopes to carry out this kind of experiment,” explained the expert.
Scientists believe that the disturbances detected in the data collected due to the stretching and contraction of the gap between Earth and the pulsars could cause their radio pulses to reach Earth a second earlier or later than expected. As reported by Sink Agency, The results are the first evidence of the gravitational wave background, a kind of soup of space-time distortions that permeates the entire universe and that scientists have long predicted.
“The importance of this discovery is that they can be used to study the evolution of galaxies, the evolution of supermassive black holes – millions of times the mass of the Sun. They will be very important for conducting astrophysical tests of the universe,” said Bonilla about the results of this research published in a collection. Papers Published yesterday in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This is the first evidence of the existence of gravitational waves at these low frequencies,” explains Vanderbilt University astrophysicist Stephen Taylor, head of the NanoGrav Collaboration and co-leader of the research: “A possible source of these ripples are supermassive black holes orbiting distant pairs.”.
Also, these are the most powerful gravitational waves known to date. The NANOGrav scientists noted that the spacetime distortions they analyzed were caused by gravitational waves, with the distance between the two ridges being two to ten light-years, or about 9 to 90 trillion kilometers.
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Einstein was right again
Gravitational waves were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 and even the theory of relativity proposed by the German scientist predicted how these waves would affect the signals from pulsars. “The large number of pulsars used in the NANOGrav analysis allowed us to see what we believe are the first signs of the interaction pattern we predicted. General relativity”, explained Dr. Xavier Siemens from the University of Oregon and co-director of NANOGrav.
For Bonilla, the discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves is comparable to discoveries that have stunned humanity in recent times, such as the Higgs boson proposed in the Standard Model of Particle Physics discovered in 2012. In both cases these are theoretical predictions that are finally seeing their confirmation.
“In the midst of the mathematics one cultivates, one does not know whether certain things are true or false; For example, there is currently talk of wormholes, in which we are supposed to be able to travel through space-time, but in principle, this is still speculation because we have no direct evidence of them. The same thing happened with black holes until direct detection was achieved,” explains the Colombian scientist.
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In addition, he adds, the discovery of low-frequency gravitational waves will allow astrophysicists to access fundamental physics not possible at other frequencies. “Theoretically, we think these signals are caused by merging supermassive black holes, but that’s not the only possibility we address in four published papers, articles. We raise the possibility of new speculative physics with very strong theoretical foundations, for example studying the first moments of the universe with inflation or primordial black holes.Bonilla explains.
Answering questions about how galaxies form, how black holes coalesce, or whether we can see the history of the early universe by detecting the gravitational waves it emits, are part of the expectations of their continued work at NANOGrav after this discovery. , Siemens, co-director of the collaboration, called the individual instruments in the cosmic orchestra playing the music of the gravitational universe, the existence of which they showed evidence to the world yesterday.
Alejandra Lopez Plazas
Scientific writing
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