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Black holes, pulsars, and gravitational waves may seem like 3 different things, but NANOGrav scientists combine them by using pulsars to try to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries! #BlackHoleWeek
Pulsars are extremely dense, rapidly-rotating neutron stars. They’re basically like taking something the mass of our sun (which is 99.99% the mass of our solar system), crushing it into the size of Manhattan, and spinning it as fast as a blender. These things are extreme!
These special neutron stars emit radiation like a lighthouse that sweeps past our line of sight. They’re very stable in the rotation, rivaling the precision of atomic clocks! We can model the time of arrival of their pulses really well and predict exactly when we’ll see them.
