Anything related to space is always fascinating. Moreso if it is about the massive distances, the things that fly far and wide and the sounds that they might make.
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Hyderabad), who are part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortium, have found evidence for ultra-low frequency gravitational waves. Such waves are expected to originate from a large number of dancing monster black hole pairs more than a million times more massive than the sun. These results include an analysis of pulsar data collected over 25 years.
“Such dancing monster black hole pairs, expected to lurk in the centres of colliding galaxies, create ripples in the fabric of our cosmos, and astronomers call them nano-hertz gravitational waves as their wavelengths can be many lakhs of crores of kilometers. The relentless cacophony of gravitational waves from a large number of supermassive black hole pairs creates a persistent humming of our universe,” the findings said.
The team published their results in two papers in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.
About the team
The team, comprising astronomers from India, Japan, and Europe, has published results from monitoring pulsars, nature’s best clocks, using six of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes, including India’s largest telescope uGMRT.
“The results could not have been possible without the NSM (National Supercomputing Mission) facility Param Seva installed at IIT Hyderabad,” a researcher from the institute said.
“The results are a crucial milestone in opening a new, astrophysically-rich window in the gravitational wave spectrum,” he said.
The IIT-H team, which took part in this discovery, comprises Shantanu Desai (faculty in the Department of Physics and Department of AI), Aman Srivastava (Physics Ph.D. student), Divyansh Kharbanda (2023 BTech graduate in Engineering Physics), and Swetha Arumugam (BTech senior in EE). Another BTech student in EE, Pragna Mamdipaka, is also part of InPTA.
The InPTA experiment also involves researchers from NCRA (Pune), TIFR (Mumbai), IIT (Roorkee), IISER (Bhopal), IMSc (Chennai), and RRI (Bengaluru), along with colleagues from Kumamoto University, Japan.