They say god gives his toughest battles to his strongest warriors.
He gave me super treatable, early stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma because he knows I’m a lil baby.
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Hank Green
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Just remembering the part of my journey where I called and then to be like, “Hey, so, you know what you’re the absolute expert on…well…I have news….and questions.”
So intensely helpful to be able to talk to people who have walked similar paths.
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OK, risky but...do folks have any things that people did, or things that they got you that you...didn't like??
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Wanna understand some of the biggest science news of the year (maybe the decade?) better than 99% of people? That new should be coming out tomorrow evening, but we know a bit about it...so here's a thread: twitter.com/EliseValdes/st…
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And, what is going to be announced tomorrow evening...I don't know. But now you know a little about Pulsar Timing Arrays, which should better prepare you for the news...and I am very excited to talk about what they did or didn't find tomorrow night, when the embargoes lift!!
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Pulsar signals are radio waves, so crucially important to this project are radio telescopes all around the world, including, before its collapse, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
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Now there are Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) teams all over the world. in the US, in Africa, in Europe, in India, in Australia...sorry if there are others I don't know about!
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And they FOUGHT LIKE HELL to get funding for something super /out there/ and experimental when there were lots of proven types of astronomy that were easier to land dollars for. But, in the end, more people joined...
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Some folks figured this out years ago, and so...they started timing pulsars....and they didn't stop. They looked up once a month for the last fifteen years to check, not ever sure if there would be any way to correct the data enough, or if there would even be a signal to detect!
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They spin super fast and (importantly) super regularly. And they're distributed all over the galaxy. And when spacetime shrinks or expands as a gravitational wave passes between them and us, theoretically, they should appear (to us) to speed up or slow down JUST A TINY BIT.
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Luckily, the universe gave us one. And, even better, a bunch of scientists were, not just clever enough, but PERSISTENT enough to figure out how to use it.
Because, in the night sky, there are these things called pulsars...and they pulse.
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But just like visible light is useful, but a very narrow look at things...the reality is, there's way more going on with gravitational waves than we can see with instruments as small as LIGO. To detect lower frequency waves, though, we'd need detectors millions of times bigger.
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With this, we can detect when two black holes orbit and then fall into each other. This is the easiest thing to detect with gravitational waves, but it's still very hard to detect. But the biggest deal here is...we proved there is a whole new way to look at the universe.
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If one of these spacetime ripples passes over LIGO, one of the arms will get a little longer and shorter than the other one. We're talking less than the width of a proton...but enough to detect!!
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But recently, we got a new way...we can detect actual ripples in spacetime, and we do it using a tool called LIGO that is basically two, perpendicular, three mile long arms that are /exactly/ the same length.
(there's actually two of them to ensure good data.)
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For almost all of the history of astronomy we have learned everything we know about the universe by looking at photons. Whether Galileo was looking at the visible light of Jupiter or the JWST was looking at the infra-red of the Orion Nebula (which it did recently...check it out.)
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Wanna understand some of the biggest science news of the year (maybe the decade?) better than 99% of people? That new should be coming out tomorrow evening, but we know a bit about it...so here's a thread:
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I feel like I'm not going to understand the announcement at all, but I can't wait for you to explain it to us!
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One thing you should know about me is, I’m going to do the thing that brings the most attention to amazing new science and the announcement coming tomorrow evening, IMO, deserves every bit of the hype it is getting right now.
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Rumors of an upcoming announcement from @NANOGrav have not been grossly exaggerated. I can’t wait to share more with you on June 29th! More details about the event will be shared soon, for now, mark your calendars!
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