Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research

Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime produced when massive compact objects — neutron stars and black holes — spiral together and merge, and detecting them has opened a fundamentally new way of observing the universe. Facilities like LIGO and Virgo capture these signals by measuring distance changes smaller than a proton's width, while pulsar timing arrays use the ultra-stable radio pulses of rotating neutron stars as a galactic-scale detector for lower-frequency waves. Each detection carries information about the extreme physics involved: how matter behaves at densities far beyond an atomic nucleus, and whether general relativity holds under the most violent conditions nature can produce. Researchers are now working to pin down the equation of state of dense nuclear matter from neutron star merger signals, and to extend sensitivity into new frequency bands with planned space-borne detectors that could reveal mergers involving supermassive black holes across cosmic distances.

Works

149,037

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1,898,645

Keywords

Gravitational WavesBinary Black HoleNeutron StarLIGO and VirgoEquation of StatePulsar Timing