The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) located in Guizhou, China, has discovered the first evidence of a type of cosmic signal that could help humanity reach massive “trans-dimensional” objects from the primordial universe.
In an online publication in the international scientific journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chinese scientists reported that through the observation of pulsars, they found important evidence for the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves.
500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST) located in Guizhou, China – (Photo: XINHUA).
Nanohertz gravitational waves have been theoretically recognized, but capturing them directly is extremely challenging due to their very low frequency and wavelengths that can stretch across several light-years.
FAST is one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes, capable of observing for extended periods some of the most “elusive” objects, such as millisecond pulsars, which are neutron stars—the remnants of massive stars—that exhibit extreme activity, rotating every 1 to 10 milliseconds.
According to CGTN, leveraging the high sensitivity of FAST, researchers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of China, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) under the China Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA) project, monitored pulsars for 41 months with a precision of 57 microseconds.
This monitoring inadvertently unveiled signs consistent with the “legendary” signals known as nanohertz gravitational waves, with a false alarm probability of just 2 parts per million.
“Nanohertz gravitational waves open an important window for humanity to observe the universe and will certainly lead to significant discoveries in physics,” emphasized NAOC Director Chang Jin.
Chang Jin stated that this discovery will be applied in the study of massive objects in the universe, including “supermassive” black holes, the formation, evolution, and merging of galaxies, and the structure of the primordial universe…
