A team of West Virginia University researchers and the Green Bank Observatory in Pocahontas County are poised to maintain key roles in gravitational wave research in coming years, thanks in part to grants from the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves Physics Frontier Center, or NANOGrav PFC, co-directed by WVU physics and astronomy professor Maura McLaughlin, recently received a $17 million NSF grant to continue its search for low-frequency gravitational waves.
The grant provides for another five years of operation by the collaborative, including $3.9 million allocated for research at WVU. There, work will be directed by McLaughlin and fellow WVU physics and astronomy professor Sarah Burke-Spolaor, and involve a number of WVU postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students.
Grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation provide NANOGrav with more than 1,800 hours of Green Bank Telescope observation time over the next three years, and pay for the installation of a new ultra wideband receiver to accommodate observations at lower frequencies, making the Green Bank Telescope more sensitive to distant sources of gravitational waves.
The new receiver, developed by the Green Bank Observatory staff and now in the testing phase, has the potential to double the precision of NANOGrav’s measurements, according to the observatory.
The Moore Foundation was created by Intel founder and former CEO Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, in 2000 to promote scientific discovery, conserve the environment and improve patient care with annual grants totaling more than $300 million.
Since its creation 15 years ago, NANOGrav’s research community has grown from a network of 17 collaborators to include more than 150 research scientists and students at 50 institutions. During that time, the organization has primarily relied on two giant radio telescopes — the Green Bank Telescope and the telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which collapsed last December — for its observations.
Loss of the Arecibo telescope “was a huge blow to us in NANOGrav,” according to Scott Ransom, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and NANOGrav’s current chairman. The added observation time at Green Bank made possible through the Moore Foundation grant, he said, helps mitigate the loss of the Arecibo telescope and keep NANOGrav research on track.
The addition of the new low frequency receiver to the Green Bank Telescope allows it to cover a much wider range of wavelengths at the same time, according to Ransom.
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“It’s like using two GBTs simultaneously to make our observations,” he said.
Gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1916 general theory of relativity, were first scientifically observed 100 years later, when researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory detected ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by the cataclysmic merger of two black holes that occurred 1.3 billion years ago.
The gravitational waves the NANOGrav team hopes to detect are those believed generated by supermassive binary black holes, with masses millions of times that of the Sun, formed when the cores of two galaxies merge. While a gravitational wave from a collision of star-sized black holes sweeps past Earth in a fraction of a second, a wave produced by the combined energy of supermassive binary black holes merging may take decades to pass through our solar system.
To detect the decades-long gravitational waves, NANOGrav researchers monitor dozens of millisecond pulsars — the dense, rapidly spinning remnants of exploded stars that emit radio beams that sweep past Earth at precise intervals like a beacon in a lighthouse. Gravitational waves cause small but measurable fluctuations to occur in the time it takes radio pulses to reach Earth from observed millisecond pulsars, sometimes referred to as nature’s most precise celestial clocks.
By studying gravitational waves, researchers expect to learn more about the origin and nature of black holes, the speed at which the universe is expanding and how galaxies were formed.
“We are in an unprecedented era of discovery for pulsar timing arrays and, more broadly, gravitational waves,” Burke-Spolaor said in a WVU news release about the grants.
“Support by the Physics Frontiers Center has provided us the resources to come together as a cogent collaboration and push forward gravitational wave science at low frequencies,” she said.
McLaughlin said WVU’s segment of NANOGrav project will involve West Virginia high school students as well as WVU undergraduates, especially those who have been under-exposed to physics and astronomy.
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