This is really big and I’m not qualified to write this diary. But I’ve only seen a couple of mentions of it in digests and I think it deserves more attention. I bring it up in hope someone educated in astrophysics can write more about it.
None of this is speculative or woo. It’s all real.
Gravitational waves were theorized by Albert Einstein when he he was thinking about Relativity. Short description, spacetime is a fabric and he thought that big events in space should create waves throughout space, gravitational waves. Like dropping a rock in a pond. I don’t know if he believed we could ever detect them experimentally or not — but he certainly could never fathom that we could read them like a history book of the universe since the big bang.
But that’s where we are now. We have the equivalent of a telescope the size of our galaxy.
A couple of gravitational wave detectors have been built on earth. I’ll skip the details but it involves long arms (a few kilometers) perpendicular to each other with lasers that can detect when space bends. A spectacular and amazing feat of science, both to conceive and build. And they’ve detected events in the universe, like two black holes colliding. An amazing an spectacular success of science to a degree that people largely don’t grasp.
But holy shit how we’ve extended those arms.
For some time some very clever scientists have been studying pulsars. Rotating neutron starts throughout our galaxy that put out amazingly regular bursts of light as they spin. More regular than atomic clocks. Someone, at some time (popular access physic books haven’t been written about it yet so I can’t say who or when) thought hey, maybe as space bends those regular pulses will be irregular.
They studied it for a dozen or so years. And over the last few weeks astrophysicists have been downright squirrely and bubbly. Excited and secretive. All, “We’ve got a secret and we can’t tell.” The news was embargoed until the paper was released on June 29.
It came out. It works. Those manmade gravitational wave detectors have been extended to the size of our galaxy. the absolute equivalent of a telescope or particle collider of that size.
It’s amazing. Astounding. It’s all just data at this point, but data rippling our universe since the beginning of it. Still around, choppy waters. The concept was the hard part, parsing the data and understanding what it means is as hard, but entirely doable at this point.