NM, PR, WV: New study by collaborative team and NSF's NANOGrav

You can't see or feel it, but everything around you — including your own body — is slowly shrinking and expanding. It's the weird, spacetime-warping effect of gravitational waves passing through our galaxy, according to a new study by a team of researchers with the NSF’s NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center. The findings published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters are from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a collaborative team of researchers from more than 50 institutions in the US and abroad.

“These are by far the most powerful gravitational waves known to exist,” said West Virginia University astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin, co-director of the NANOgrav Physics Frontiers Center. “Detecting such gargantuan gravitational waves requires a similarly massive detector, and patience.”

Using 15 years of astronomical data recorded by radio telescopes at NSF-supported observatories — including Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico— the NANOGrav team created a "detector" of 67 pulsars distributed all across the sky and compared the ticking rate of pairs of those pulsars. Through a sophisticated data analysis, they deduced the presence of the gravitational wave background causing the distortion of space, and thus explained the apparent timing changes of the pulsars.