Pulsar Watchers Close In On Galaxy Merger History

“We know that galaxy mergers are an important part of galaxy growth and evolution through cosmic time. By detecting gravitational waves from supermassive binary black holes at the cores of merging galaxies, we will be able to probe how galaxies are shaped by those black holes,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, assistant professor at West Virginia University.

Fifty years ago, the February 24, 1968 edition of the journal Nature provided the solution, with the discovery of a new kind of star. This new star was curious, emitting regular radio pulses once every 1.3 seconds. Graduate student Jocelyn Bell (now Dr. Bell Burnell) was the first to spot the signal, seeing it as “a bit of scruff” in her radio surveys. Zooming in on the scruff, Bell saw the regular pulses from the star.

After first entertaining the possibility that the pulses could be the result of LGM, or “little green men,” the new star was dubbed a pulsar, with the understanding that the pulses represented the rotation rate of the star. Such a rapid rotation rate meant that the star must be small, about the size of a city. Only a few years later, a pulsar in a binary system was found, and the first mass estimate indicated that this tiny object held about one and a half times the mass of our sun.

The fastest pulsars, called millisecond pulsars, spin hundreds of times every second (faster than your kitchen blender!), and are the most stable natural clocks known in the universe. Pulsar astronomers around the globe are monitoring these stellar clocks in order to form a new kind of cosmic gravitational wave detector known as a “Pulsar Timing Array.” By carefully measuring when radio pulses arrive from millisecond pulsars, astronomers can track the tiny changes in the distance from the Earth to the pulsars caused by the stretching and squeezing of spacetime due to a gravitational wave.

In the US and Canada, a group called NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory forGravitational Waves) is searching for these gravitational waves using some of the largest telescopes in the world, including the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. NANOGrav routinely joins forces with groups in Europe and Australia to improve their sky coverage and sensitivity. Collectively known as the International Pulsar Timing Array, the combined observations from these groups constitute the most sensitive data set in the world for searching for low-frequency gravitational waves.

This month, fifty years after the publication of the first pulsar discovery, NANOGrav has submitted a pair of companion papers to the Astrophysical Journal describing eleven years of monthly observations of 45 millisecond pulsars along with the astrophysical implications of their results. For the first time, the data set includes a six-pulsar “high-frequency” sample, with measurements made every week to expand the pulsar timing array’s sensitivity range.