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Gravitational wave search no humdrum hunt
28 May 2021
The gentle hum of a spinning neutron star is very faint and almost impossible to detect
The hunt for the never before heard hum of gravitational waves caused by mysterious neutron stars has just got a lot easier, thanks to an international team of researchers.
Gravitational waves have only been detected from black holes and neutron stars colliding, major cosmic events that cause huge bursts that ripple through space and time.
The research team, involving scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), Virgo Collaboration and the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics (CGA) at The Australian National University (ANU), are now turning their eagle eye to spinning neutron stars to detect the waves.
Credit: Mark Myers, OzGrav/ Swinburne University
The hunt for the never before heard hum of gravitational waves caused by mysterious neutron stars has just got a lot easier, thanks to an international team of researchers.
Gravitational waves have only been detected from black holes and neutron stars colliding, major cosmic events that cause huge bursts that ripple through space and time.
The research team, involving scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), Virgo Collaboration and the Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics (CGA) at The Australian National University (ANU), are now turning their eagle eye to spinning neutron stars to detect the waves.
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VIDEO: Artist s impression of continuous gravitational waves generated by a spinning asymmetric neutron star. view more
Credit: Mark Myers, Ozgrav-Swinburne University
Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometre-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, the team have witnessed the explosive collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Recent studies, however, have been looking for something quite different: the elusive signal from a solitary, rapidly-spinning neutron star.