Detecting gravitational waves from supermassive black hole collisions using pulsars

After five detections over the last few years, gravitational waves are in danger of becoming boring news. But it's worth keeping in mind just how groundbreaking a discovery it is. After all, these are distortions in the very fabric of spacetime. The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for these past detections, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the "cosmic lighthouses" of the sky.

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Category: Space

Tags:

• Black hole
• gravitational waves
• JPL
• LIGO
• NASA
• Stars
• Supermassive black hole

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