Chinese team finds key evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves with FAST telescope

Name: World’s largest radio telescope detects mystery flashes 3 billion light years away from Earth
Uploaded: 2023-06-29T00:00:27.000Z
Duration: 1 min 45 s
Description: World’s largest radio telescope detects mystery flashes 3 billion light years away from Earth

Chinese Pulsar Timing Array team conducts more than three years of observation and data analysis before reporting ‘very encouraging’ findings

‘We are finally opening a brand new window on the gravitational-wave universe,’ team says

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An artist’s interpretation of an array of pulsars being affected by gravitational ripples produced by a supermassive black hole binary in a distant galaxy. Photo: Aurore Simonnet for the NANOGrav Collaboration

Ling Xinin Ohio

Published: 8:00am, 29 Jun 2023

A Chinese team has found key evidence of low-frequency gravitational waves, which are ripples of space-time that could provide clues to some of our universe’s darkest secrets.

Using the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA) team spent more than three years tracking 57 exotic stars known as pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy in order to catch the tiny ripples.

Team leader Kejia Lee of Peking University said their data analysis results pointed to the existence of such waves.

During a press briefing in Beijing on Tuesday, he hailed the finding as “very encouraging” and said it could help scientists systematically study some of the best kept secrets of the universe, such as two supermassive black holes orbiting each other at the core of galaxies.

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World’s largest radio telescope detects mystery flashes 3 billion light years away from Earth

“Our statistical confidence level is 4.6 sigma, which means the chances for the signal to be caused by some noise rather than gravitational waves are lower than two in a million,” Lee said. The team’s paper appeared in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics on Thursday.