Home PBS Space Time Season 2023 Episode 20

Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?!?

PBS Space Time · Season 2023 · Episode 20
A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching for subtle connections between the signals from rapidly spinning cores of dead stars in our galactic neighborhood. In other words, the gravitational wave background has probably been detected using a pulsar timing array.

Episode Details

Air date, runtime, timezone, and episode position.

Season
2023
Episode
20
Air Date
26/Jul/2023
Air Time
12:00
Runtime
17 min

Overview

Episode summary.

A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching for subtle connections between the signals from rapidly spinning cores of dead stars in our galactic neighborhood. In other words, the gravitational wave background has probably been detected using a pulsar timing array.

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