Get the latest tech news
Five new ways to catch gravitational waves – and the secrets they'll reveal
Observatories, experiments and techniques are being developed to spot ripples in space-time at frequencies that currently can’t be detected.
Four separate collaborations, in North America, Europe, Australia and China, unveiled tantalizing hints of a pattern expected from a random ‘stochastic background’ of gravitational waves that make Earth slosh around, probably caused by a cacophony of supermassive black-hole binaries, says astrophysicist Chiara Mingarelli at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. This requires painstaking work, because each group processed its raw data in slightly different ways, and so it could take at least another year to get to publication, says Scott Ransom, an astrophysicist at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a senior member of the North American collaboration. Jason Hogan (left) and Mark Kasevich work on an atom interferometer — a device that could reveal mergers of black holes much more massive than those seen by current laser interferometers.Credit: L.A. Cicero and Stanford University
Or read this on Hacker News