gravitational waves tagged posts

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in conjunction with the international Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration, announce the discovery of nearly 300 gamma ray pulsars in the publication of their Third Catalog of Gamma Ray Pulsars. This milestone comes 15 years since the launch of Fermi in 2008, when there were fewer than ten known gamma-ray pulsars.

“Work on this important catalog has been going on in our group for years,” said Paul Ray, Ph.D., head of the High Energy Astrophysics and Applications Section at NRL.

“Our scientists and postdocs have been able to both discover and analyze the timing behavior and spectra of many of these newfound pulsars as part of our quest to further our understanding of these exotic stars that we are able to use as cosmic clocks.”

Pul...

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation.

The physical concept of resonance surrounds us in everyday life. When you’re sitting on a swing and want to go higher, you naturally start pumping your legs back and forth...

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs.

Two colliding neutron stars—each the super-dense core of an exploded star—produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole.

Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory—an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst—vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct.

Brief and powerful
FRBs are in...

Gravitational wave scientists from The University of Western Australia have led the development of a new laser mode sensor with unprecedented precision that will be used to probe the interiors of neutron stars and test fundamental limits of general relativity.

Research Associate from UWA’s Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav-UWA) Dr. Aaron Jones said UWA coordinated a global collaboration of gravitational wave, metasurface and photonics experts to pioneer a new method to measure structures of light called “eigenmodes.”

“Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA store enormous amount of optical power and several pairs of mirrors are used to increas...