Astrophysicists prepare for age of multi-messenger astronomy, build galaxy catalog to study black holes
Published Date: 6/24/2021
Source: phys.org
Led by postdoctoral fellow researcher Maria Charisi, a team of international researchers known as the NANOGrav collaboration has created a catalog of 45,000 galaxies to detect gravitational waves created by pairs of black holes known as binaries. Using pulsars—the most precise clocks of the sky—a galactic scale detector dubbed a pulsar timing array and infrared data from across the sky, Charisi used the catalog to input hypothetical binaries to measure differences in the masses of the two black holes or their distance from each other within a galaxy. "Since we haven't found gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays yet, we can play with our binary parameters and a range of gravitational wave frequencies to find the limits of the sizes of black hole binaries in specific galaxies," Charisi said.