Katie Mack (@AstroKatie)
nitter.1d4.us
The news is out! The @NANOGrav pulsar timing array collaboration has detected a background of cosmic gravitational waves rippling through our Universe! Let’s talk about it!(Full press conference tomorrow, https://nanograv.org/news/2023Announcement)1/n

This is the announcement that was being hyped up in that aliens or time-travel thread a few days ago.

The announcement is that the scientists who were studying gravitational waves found gravitational waves. This was perhaps a bit overhyped.

To be fair, it's a very big experiment and it's nice that they got it all to work. They also found more gravitational waves than expected.

    • culpritus [any]
      ·
      1 year ago

      This part stood out:

      The detection of GW170817 in 2017, the finalé of a neutron star inspiral observed through both gravitational waves and gamma rays, at a distance of 130 million light years, currently provides by far the best limit on the difference between the speed of light and that of gravity. Photons were detected 1.7 seconds after peak gravitational wave emission; assuming a delay of zero to 10 seconds, the difference between the speeds of gravitational and electromagnetic waves, vGW − vEM, is constrained to between −3×10−15 and +7×10−16 times the speed of light.