Low frequency gravitational waves
29 Jan 2022 15:40:21 UTC
Topic 226879
(moderation:
According to "Nature" an article published in the January issue of "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" refers the results of the "International Timing Pulsar Array", a cooperation of six radiotelescopes including Arecibo, Green Bank, Sardinia, Lovell and Westerbork which measured the frequencies of 65 pulsars over a period of 15 yers. The pulsar frequency can vary by a very small amount when it is hit by a gravitational wave, so it must be measured with great precision.The original article puts forward the idea of a gravitational waves background similar to the Cosmic microwave background but says this is not yet definitely proven.Could our data on gamma ray pulsars be included in this project?
Tullio
tullio wrote: Could our data
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My guess is : probably not.
I reckon the gamma ray data may not by itself give a sufficiently good pulse definition - one only receives a single gamma photon per many thousands of revolutions - to be sufficiently precise about pulse arrival times, that could in turn reliably yield a demonstrable shift due to a gravitational wave.
Compare that to a radio pulsar where very many radio frequency photons are received per pulsar cycle.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal