Awesome Pulsar Lab Spans the Milky Way

[n2doc]

A global team of researchers are making their own adjective insignificant, engineering an observatory so vast that the Earth itself almost disappears. It's a scheme that makes Doctor Doom look like a toy collector - hell, it's a network of massively magnetized radiation dynamos stretching across the galaxy. It makes the Death Star look like a speck of dust.

The best bit about it is that the galactinet is already out there. Pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars which get their name from how their emissions only point at us once per cycle, are scattered throughout the galaxy and form the ultimate clock network. By erecting an array to observe the emissions from a set of pulsars, we effectively set up an interstellar network of tripwires triggered by only the very greatest things in existence.

Gravity waves. Cosmic strings. The inflation of the universe. These can bend the very idea of spacetime, which is an awesome sentence, and therefore interfere with the transit time of the pulsar radiation. With a web of such super-accurate astronomical timekeepers we could watch gravity waves roll through space as they pass through each one. Terrestrial gravity wave detectors haven't seen anything so far, possibly because their scale is limited by the size of the Earth. This detector net is so many orders of magnitude greater the previous experiments become a rounding error.

The NANOGrav team, as well as having one of the best names ever, estimate the Earth-side systems required for this incredible effort would only cost sixty-six million dollars, with the next generation of astronomical equipment increasing the accuracy to unheard of levels.

This is exactly why humanity is so awesome. First we found the pulsars, and got excited about the incredible new things out there; then we worked them out, explained them and added them to what we know; now we're megascale MacGyvering them, turning them into a tool to learn even more about existence. Fantastic.

Luke McKinney
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/09/pulsar-laboratory-that-spans-the-milky-way.html#more

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Nifty!

[Ready4Change]

2. That is one very cool idea.

Passively using what is already there. Very nice.