Pulsars, dead stars acting like giant lighthouses in space rotating so predictably that astronomers can use them as distant clocks far from the Earth. I'm Jackson Taylor, a graduate student here at WVU studying these objects, and I recently had the wonderful opportunity to visit Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav Fall meeting. NANOGrav is a group of pulsar astronomers and physicists working together to use pulsars to detect low-frequency gravitational waves permeating throughout our Milky Way galaxy. The combination of gravitational waves produced by sources spread throughout the Universe is called the gravitational wave background. In 2023, they found strong evidence that such a background exists and are avidly working to gather more evidence. They are even trying to determine what is creating this background.
