This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

In 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, made the first accepted detection of gravitational

waves.

So anytime you move a mass, it produces a gravitational wave.

So black holes, like the ones LIGO detected, these are stellar mass black holes, like the ones Lago detected, these are stellar mass black holes, about 10 times the mass of the sun.

When they're in orbit, they're accelerating constantly, so constantly producing gravitational waves.

Sarah Burke Spallore of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico at the annual

meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on February

18th. For gravitational waves produced by the acceleration of even bigger

masses, we're going to need what's called the laser interferometer space antenna, or Lisa.

Now if you think of much bigger masses, something like, you know, a million times the mass of the sun,

these things are moving much more slowly, much more far apart, and they're producing lower frequency gravitational waves.

And this is what Lisa can detect.

So LIGO which is operating at these very fast orbits, fast frequencies is unable to detect these

things that are moving much more slowly and are on a much bigger

masses you get to what Birx Spelore is working on, pulsar timing arrays.

What we do with this technique is use radio telescopes to observe pulsars, which are neutron

stars that are rotating very rapidly and sending their beams of emission across Earth

about several hundred times per second.

And the idea is, of course, that if a gravitational wave is passing through Earth,

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