Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?!?
575,572
Published 2023-07-26
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A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching for subtle connections between the signals from rapidly spinning cores of dead stars in our galactic neighborhood. In other words, the gravitational wave background has probably been detected using a pulsar timing array.
Thumbnail Image Illustration Credit: Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav
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00:00 Introduction
01:02 Relativity and Gravitational Waves
02:21 Discovering Gravitational Waves
03:49 Gravitational Waves & Pulsars
05:04 Pulsar Timing Array Discovers GWB
06:48 Understanding the GWB
07:55 Are Pulsars Seeing Gravitational Waves?
09:00 Correlated & Anti-Correlated Pulsar Rates
10:07 Hellings and Downs Curve
11:44 Binary Supermassive Black Holes
13:39 NANOgrav Frequency Spectrum
All Comments (21)
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Kudos to the team responsible for visual effects on this channel. They do amazing work
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I just love how you guys can communicate science to the layman such as myself. Ye make everything so accessible. I dunno, i reckon that ye deserve an award of some sort. Its always interesting and i always learn something new and fascinating. Thank you for the hours of entertainment and education. Favourite channel by far
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I'm so happy this channel is still around, it was a driving force for my interest in physics back in high school 6 years ago. Fast forward to today and I'm less than a year away from getting a degree in engineering physics
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Love the Anton and Dr. Becky shoutouts. Anton in particular deserves all the love.
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Your graphical representations are phenomenal.
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I've always believed in galactic giga whales. So glad to see space time positing a theory of their existence.
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It tickled me to see my other favorite science youtuber, Anton, in your video. You both are awesome creators!
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This channel continues to be among the very best on YouTube! Thanks so much for making these amazing discoveries a little more accessible to all of us! ...also, galactic gigawhale t-shirts when?
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As always, I'm blown away by your visual and written explanations. You are the channel I want to be when I grow up.
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While I did watch Dr. Becky's video first, it's important to get the information from multiple sources... I'm happy you referenced her, as that's added evidence of the quality of her channel. Thank you.
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this makes so much sense to me. that's why the universe on a macro scale looks like the light reflections of surface of water in motion, like a pool or something.
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Channels like this are so important because monumental discoveries like this are otherwise buried in the noise that is our grasping pop culture soup. I’m constantly appalled that you never see coverage of these stories in mainstream media. (I’d say news but we don’t really have mainstream news sources anymore other than local newspapers.)
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Not to be that guy, but I know you value accuracy, so I have to point out that LIGO first detected gravitational waves in September 2015, not 2016. I say this with all humility and want to close by telling you how much I really love and appreciate what you do at Spacetime- thank you for opening new worlds to those of us who otherwise would not have access 🙂
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My favorite is when YouTubers reference other YouTubers similar videos, knowing their audience has probably seen said videos instead of bickering about who did it first or best.
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3:19 "Inspiraling Stellar Corpses" is a great metal band name
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Fantastic- the animations and explanations are literally and figuratively out of this world
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It’s amazing we’ve been getting this kind of quality information for years through public funding such a good channel
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before I even watch the full video, I just want to say I love the fact that I never have to panic about 'when will the next video come out that I can binge??' because, if science is happening, you can best believe Matt and the team are going to comment on it. And, as everyone always points out, it's at a level that most can understand! Thank you so much for everything you do.
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This is rad! We are all perpetually roaming, fleeting gravitational-waves
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I've been really interested in all the discoveries and space missions that have been happening the last several years, and channels like this one help so much to understand this stuff without needing a degree in quantum physics or something. Thanks for these!
