IIT Hyderabad researchers find evidence on humming of the universe

has published results from monitoring pulsars, nature’s best clocks, using six of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes, including India’s largest telescope uGMRT.

Sangareddy: A team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology-Hyderabad (IIT-H), who were part of an international team of astronomers from India, Japan, and Europe, has published results from monitoring pulsars, nature’s best clocks, using six of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes, including India’s largest telescope uGMRT.

The results provide a hint of evidence for the relentless vibrations of the fabric of the universe, caused by ultra-low frequency gravitational waves. Such waves are expected to originate from a large number of dancing monster black hole pairs, crores of times heavier than our Sun. The team’s results are a crucial milestone in opening a new, astrophysically-rich window in the gravitational wave spectrum, according to a press release.

---

Such dancing monster black hole pairs, expected to lurk in the centres of colliding galaxies, create ripples in the fabric of our cosmos, and astronomers call them nano-hertz gravitational waves as their wavelengths can be many lakhs of crores of kilometres. The relentless cacophony of gravitational waves from a large number of supermassive black hole pairs creates a persistent humming of our universe, they said.

The team, consisting of members of the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) and Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortia, published their results in two papers in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal, and their results hint at the presence of such gravitational waves in their data set. These results include an analysis of pulsar data collected over 25 years with six of the world’s largest radio telescopes.

The IIT-H team which took part in this discovery consists of Dr Shantanu Desai, faculty in the Department of Physics and Department of AI, Mr Aman Srivastava, Physics PhD student, Divyansh Kharbanda (2023 BTech graduate in Engineering Physics), Swetha Arumugam (rising BTech senior in EE). Another B Tech student in EE, Pragna Mamdipaka, is also part of InPTA and is playing an active role in ongoing InPTA efforts. IIT-H has been part of InPTA since 2018, and some of the past InPTA students from IIT-H are pursuing higher studies in Astrophysics and related industries.