Astronomers to Use Pulsars to Detect Gravitational Waves Created by Super-Massive Black Holes

Last year, an international team of scientists discovered a promising way to fine-tune pulsars into the best precision time-pieces in the Universe and provide astronomers with a new tool to study the powerful gravitational forces that shaped the universe.

Pulsars--incredibly fast spinning collapsed stars--have been studied in great detail since their discovery in 1967.

Pulsars rank at or near the top of freaky phenomena found in our Universe. In the early 1930s, California Institute of Technology astrophysicist, Fred Zwicky, an immigrant from Bulgaria, focused his attention on a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance of random, unexplained points of light.

It occurred to Zwicky that if a star collapsed to the sort of density found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core: atoms would be crushed together with their electrons squeezed into the nucleus, forming neutrons and a neutron star, with a core so dense that a single spoonful would weigh 200 billion pounds. But there's more, Zwicky  concluded: with the collapse of the star there would be  huge amounts of leftover energy that would result in a massive explosion,  the biggest in the known universe that we called today supernovas.

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