What is this ? And why it is blowing up on Twitter with astrophysicists? Are we doomed ?
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There’s some sort of big announcement coming up, so no wonder there’s a buzz in the community:
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-big-gravitational-wave-announcement-is-coming-thursday-heres-why-were-excited
Can’t say what the actual content is, since it wasn’t made yet, just that its about the thing you’re asking about, the PTA.
Just as basic background:
Pulars are neutron stars (dead cores of supernovas that were just not heavy enough to become black holes) which are oriented in such a way that they “flash” us on earth with a focused beam of radiation as they rotate. They spin very fast and the rotation is extremely regular.
This very regular rotation allows them to be used as very precise clocks. Very precise clocks very far away. A disturbance of this timing can tell us things, either about the pulsar itself or about the space between us and it. Determining what it’s saying about what takes a lot of very intelligent people a lot of time and effort, so I hope you’ll excuse not going into details, but one of the those things can be gravitational distortion of space-time, AKA gravitational waves.
But having one pulsar only gives one point in the sky. You want to be able to make measurements all across the sky. For that you would need a map of many pulsars arranged in the sky. Some sort of… Array. An array of pulsars whose timing you’re measuring.
A Pulsar Timing Array, if you will.
The organisation that announced the upcoming release was involved in exactly that, trying to map gravitational waves using pulsars. Apparently they have results worthy of a major buzz.
No, we’re not doomed. It’s unfortunately not a sci-fi superweapon.
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