IN DEP TH
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ASTRONOMY
Long-sought gravitational
wave hum finally detected
Subtle shifts in stellar signals reveal pervasive
waves from mergers of giant black holes
By Adam Mann
B
y turning networks of dead stars into
galaxy-size gravitational wave detec-
tors, radio astronomers have tuned
into the slowly undulating swells
in spacetime thought to arise from
pairs of supermassive black holes
(SMBHs) that are about to collide.
In a simultaneous announcement on
28 June, five separate international teams
said that after nearly 20 years of effort they
had found evidence for these gravitational
waves. They are far longer than the waves
first captured by ground-based detectors
in 2015, which emanate from collisions
of star-size objects. The findings not only
open up a new window in gravitational
wave astronomy, but will also help re-
searchers answer questions about the ori-
gin and evolution of SMBHs, objects that
sit at the center of galaxies and weigh as
much as billions of Suns. The results could
even uncover hints of new physics.
“I’m so thrilled to live through the era
of not only one [gravitational wave] detec-
tion, but multiple detections,” says Vicky
Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwest-
ern University who wasn’t involved with
1306 30 JUNE 2023 • VOL 380 ISSUE 6652
the work. “This is really epic,” agrees
Jason Hessels of the University of Amster-
dam, who formerly worked with one of the
teams announcing the findings.
The new results rely on millisecond pul-
sars, highly magnetized stellar remnants
that emit beams of radiation as they spin
as fast as 1000 times per second. Their
lighthouse-like radio signals sweep past
our planet with a regularity that rivals an
atomic clock. Should a passing gravitational
wave intrude anywhere along the path be-
tween Earth and the pulsar, it will stretch
and squash the fabric of space—and cause
small variations in the timing of the flashes.
“Those ultraprecise signals will arrive a
little bit early, and then a little bit late,”
says Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at
Yale University and a member of the North
American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravi-
tational Waves. NANOGrav is one of the five
international pulsar timing arrays (PTAs),
which draw on data from a dozen radio tele-
scopes around the world to monitor dozens
of the beacons for evidence of the waves.
The challenge is immense because of
the many potential corrupting sources of
noise: radio interference from terrestrial
technology and satellites, scattering of the
Like buoys in an ocean, pulsars bob on undulating
gravitational waves from supermassive black holes.
pulsar’s radio beams by intervening clouds
of gas, and tiny random variations in the
spins of the pulsars themselves. “You have
to beat down all these confusing signals,”
Hessels says.
But NANOGrav investigators now feel
they have strong evidence for the waves, in
a 15-year data set of 67 pulsars located up
to 20,000 light-years away. They identified
anomalies of one part in a quadrillion—
comparable to measuring the distance
between Earth and the Moon to within ILLUSTRATION: AURORE SIMONNET/NANOGRAV COLLABORATION
1/1000th of 1 millimeter. The team is report-
ing the detection at a 3.5- to 4-sigma level,
indicating more than 99% confidence that
the signal is real. However, this falls short
of the 5-sigma threshold that physicists of-
ten want before claiming a discovery. “As a
group we’ve agreed to avoid the D-word,”
says team member Scott Ransom of the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
NANOGrav’s results were published in
five papers in The Astrophysical Journal
Letters, while simultaneous papers ap-
peared in other journals from the European
PTA, the Australian PTA, the Indian PTA,
science.org SCIENCE
 NE WS

and the Chinese PTA. The data sets are
different: NANOGrav monitored the most
pulsars, the European PTA had the longest
running data set, and the Australian PTA
was the only effort watching pulsars in the
southern skies. But, “We’re confident about
the result because we’re all seeing the
same thing,” says Michael Kramer, a leader
of the European PTA at the Max Planck In-
stitute for Radio Astronomy.
The signal is very different from what
ground-based detectors such as the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observa-
tory (LIGO) pick up. Those are sensitive to
the milliseconds-long blasts of waves pro-
duced by individual mergers of black holes
and neutron stars with masses tens of times
that of the Sun. The pulsar timing results in-
stead represent many waves, each years to
decades long, overlapping in a cumulative
background hum. Each wave is generated
by a pair of SMBHs somewhere in the uni-
really going into new territory and set-
ting bounds and constraints in ways which
have never been done before.”
If galaxy mergers really are the source of
the background, the finding would settle a
lingering question. Theoretical work in the
1980s suggested pairs of orbiting SMBHs
would slowly get closer as they lost energy
to gravitational waves. But they would even-
tually stall out just a few light-years apart,
where they would hang on in their dance
for longer than the age of the universe be-
fore approaching close enough to generate
strong gravitational waves at frequencies
most detectable by the PTAs. The fact that
the PTAs detected a signal at all suggests
that friction from gas and dust—or other
stars and black holes—must be helping
the SMBHs shed energy and pass the stall-
out threshold.
The background signal is stronger than
expected, implying that this population of
from NASA’s JWST space telescope hinting
that galaxies grew larger and faster in the
early universe than once thought.
Each PTA has its own quirks and sources
of noise, says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theo-
retical astrophysicist at Yale. But because
the five collaborations together monitor
more than 100 pulsars, “a combined analy-
sis would likely help us cross the [5-sigma]
threshold to an actual detection.” That could
happen in the next year or two, she thinks.
By mapping how the overall background
varies on the sky, the PTAs might eventu-
ally get good enough to detect individual
SMBH pairs in the nearby universe, en-
abling other telescopes to zoom in to study
what happens in galaxies after they merge.
More pulsars would help. The Canadian
Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment,
a radio survey telescope, is on the hunt,
and China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture
Spherical radio Telescope, the world’s big-

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verse whose host galaxies have collided and imminently merging SMBHs numbers in gest, is finding pulsars too faint for other
merged. The black holes orbit one another the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even facilities. The Deep Synoptic Array, a pro-
for tens of millions of years, emitting gravi- millions. It could also mean the SMBHs posed collection of 2000 radio dishes in the
tational waves in the lead-up to an eventual are either bigger or merging more quickly Nevada desert, could add to the harvest.
merger. (Unlike LIGO, the PTAs are not sen- than astronomers previously predicted— The European Space Agency’s Laser
sitive to the mergers themselves—just the a possibility consistent with observations Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a
death spirals.) space-based detector, might
The background signal help fill out the spectrum of
could include other, more ex- gravitational waves. LISA,
otic sources. Primordial gravi- A gravitational wave spectrum which is scheduled to launch
The 100-meter-wide Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia was a critical tool
tational waves might have in 2037, would be able to see
in the pulsar timing arrays that have now detected long-period gravitational
been generated shortly after gravitational waves in a wave-
waves, likely from gargantuan black holes. Detectors on the ground and in
the big bang if the universe space are sensitive to shorter period waves from other sources.
length range between those
experienced convulsions from observed by LIGO and the
a still-hypothetical breakneck PTAs. These would come from
DETECTOR TYPE PERIOD SOURCES
expansion in size known as mergers of intermediate-size
inflation. Some theorists also Pulsar timing Years to Merging supermassive black holes, those between
posit that the violent emer- arrays decades black holes (SMBHs), big bang 100,000 and 10,000,000 times
gence of one of the funda- ripples, exotic new physics our Sun’s mass, such as the
mental forces at the dawn of one that lives in the center of
Space-based Hours to Midsize SMBHs, stellar-size black
time left defects in spacetime interferometers seconds hole mergers, white dwarf mergers the Milky Way. “The hope is
called cosmic strings, which that we can paint a picture of
would now stretch across the Ground-based Milliseconds Stellar black hole mergers, merging the entire gravitational wave
universe, vibrating like piano interferometers neutron stars, supernovae landscape, reaching from very
wires and emitting gravita- low frequencies all the way up
tional waves in the range that to very high frequencies,” says
PTAs are sensitive to. Kai Schmitz, a NANOGrav
Certain kinds of dark team member at the Univer-
matter—the mysterious sub- sity of Münster.
stance that makes up 80% of Having heard the cosmic
the matter in the universe— hum, the teams now want to
might also produce the long- listen more closely, digging
period oscillations. The PTA deeper into their data sets to
results already help rule out find out what else they might
some lightweight dark mat- learn. “We’re not even close to
ter particles, which would the end of the story,” Hessels
have produced a bigger says. “It’s a game of dedica-
PHOTO: JEE SEYMOUR

anomaly than was observed, tion and patience.” j

says Andrea Mitridate, a
NANOGrav team member With reporting by Daniel Clery.
at DESY, Germany’s particle Adam Mann is a journalist in
physics laboratory. “This is Oakland, California.

SCIENCE science.org 30 JUNE 2023 • VOL 380 ISSUE 6652 1307

 Long-sought gravitational wave hum finally detected
Adam Mann

Science, 380 (6652), .

DOI: 10.1126/science.adj4496

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