Hints of low-frequency gravitational waves found

Since their direct discovery in 2015 by the LIGO and Virgo detectors, gravitational waves (GWs) have opened a new view on extreme cosmic events such as the merging of black holes. These events typically generate gravitational waves with frequencies of a few tens to a few thousand hertz, within reach of ground-based detectors. But the universe is also expected to be pervaded by low-frequency GWs in the nHz range, produced by the superposition of astrophysical sources and possibly by high-energy processes at the very earliest times (see “Gravitational waves: a golden era”). 

Announced in late June, news that pulsar timing arrays (PTAs), which infer the presence of GWs via detailed measurements of the radio emission from pulsars, had seen the first evidence for such a stochastic GW background was therefore met with delight by particle physicists and cosmologists alike. “For me it feels that the first gravitational wave observed by LIGO is like seeing a star for the first time, and now it’s like seeing the cosmic microwave background for the first time,” says CERN theorist Valerie Domcke.

Clocking signals

Whereas the laser interferometers LIGO and Virgo detect relative length changes in two perpendicular arms, PTAs clock the highly periodic signals from millisecond pulsars (rapidly rotating neutron stars), some of which are in Earth’s line of sight. A passing GW perturbs spacetime and induces a small delay in the observed arrival time of the pulses. By observing a large sample of pulsars over a long period and correlating the signals, PTAs effectively turn the galaxy into a low-frequency GW observatory. The challenge is to pick out the characteristic signature of this stochastic background, which is expected to induce “red noise” (meaning there should be greater power at lower fluctuation frequencies) in the differences between the measured arrival times of the pulsars and the timing-model predictions. 

The smoking gun of a nHz GW detection is a measurement of the so-called Hellings–Downs (HD) curve based on general relativity. This curve predicts the arrival-time correlations as a function of angular separation for pairs of pulsars, which vary because the quadrupolar nature of GWs introduces directionally dependent changes. 

Following its first hints of these elusive correlations in 2020, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has released the results of its 15-year dataset. Based on observations of 68 millisecond-pulsars distributed over half the galaxy (21 more than in the last release) by the Arecibo Observatory, the Green Bank Telescope and the Very Large Array, the team finds 4σ evidence for HD correlations in both frequentist and Bayesian analyses.

We are opening a new window in the GW universe, where we can observe unique sources and phenomena

A similar signal is seen by the independent European PTA, and the results are also supported by data from the Parkes PTA and others. “Once the partner collaborations of the International Pulsar Timing Array (which includes NANOGrav, the European, Parkes and Indian PTAs) combine these newest datasets, this may put us over the 5σ threshold,” says NANOGrav spokesperson Stephen Taylor. “We expect that it will take us about a year to 18 months to finalise.”

It will take longer to decipher the precise origin of the low-frequency PTA signals. If the background is aniso­tropic, astrophysical sources such as supermassive black-hole binaries would be the likely origin and one could therefore learn about their environment, population and how galaxies merge. Phase transitions or other cosmological sources tend to lead to an isotropic background. Since the shape of the GW spectrum encodes information about the source, with more data it should become possible to disentangle the signatures of the two potential sources. PTAs and current, as well as next-generation, GW detectors such as LISA and the Einstein Telescope complement each other as they cover different frequency ranges. For instance, LISA could detect the same supermassive black-hole binaries as PTAs but at different times during and after their merger. 

“We are opening a new window in the gravitational-wave universe in the nanohertz regime, where we can observe unique sources and phenomena,” says European PTA collaborator Caterina Tiburzi of the Cagliari Observatory in Sardinia.