IIT-H researchers, as part of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortium, have found evidence for ultra-low frequency gravitational waves originating from a large number of ‘dancing monster black hole pairs’ more than a million times the size of the Sun.
The researchers, part of an international team of astronomers from India, Japan, and Europe, has published results from monitoring ‘pulsars’, nature’s best clocks, using six of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes, including the country’s largest telescope uGMRT, said an official release on Wednesday.
These results provide a hint of evidence for the relentless vibrations of the fabric of the universe and are a crucial milestone in opening a new, astrophysically rich window in the gravitational wave spectrum. Such ‘dancing monster black hole pairs’, expected to lurk in the centres of colliding galaxies, create ripples in the fabric of cosmos, and astronomers call them ‘nano-hertz’ gravitational waves as their wavelengths can be many lakhs of crores of kilometres.
