They reported Wednesday that they were able to “hear” what are called low-frequency gravitational waves — changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space.
“It’s really the first time that we have evidence of just this large-scale motion of everything in the universe,” said Maura McLaughlin, co-director of NANOGrav, the research collaboration that published the results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Einstein predicted that when really heavy objects move through spacetime — the fabric of our universe — they create ripples that spread through that fabric. Scientists sometimes liken these ripples to the background music of the universe.
The article explains how this was different from the LIGO observation of gravitational waves caused by the collision of black holes or neutron stars.
