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.
Since this was my first NANOGrav meeting, I decided to attend the student workshop held the weekend before the main meeting. This was a great time to get acclimated to the city and meet student colleagues who I’ll likely work with for the rest of my career! My roommate was from the East Coast and attending a liberal arts college in upstate New York, so my Midwestern self enjoyed getting to know his perspective on things. The workshop was a great success because it allowed me to get up to speed on general topics important to the collaboration. Not to get too much into the thick of it, but I received crash courses on pulsar timing, pulsar noise, gravitational waves, and astrophysical sources of gravitational waves. Cool stuff! My roommate and I also got a chance to eat excellent food and talk football with the locals. My alma mater, Indiana University, is enjoying a rare streak of success in football so I had my fair share of gloating.
Then on Monday, the official meeting kicked off. I was pretty nervous the first day because I was one of the presenters. I shared the research that I have been pioneering this year, which is on trojan asteroids around pulsars. Trojan asteroids in our own solar system are asteroids that either lead or trail Jupiter in its orbit around the sun. They share the same orbital period as Jupiter and can stably exist in this configuration for billions of years. Such objects should theoretically exist in some pulsar binary systems—systems where the pulsar has another star orbiting it. I’m using data from the Green Bank Telescope right here in West Virginia to try to detect these pulsar trojans. Even if none are detected, I’ll be able to rule them out, which would still be an important result since their absence would also have to be explained.
The other presentations included computational and software development topics and then some neat astrophysics talks, like what the signal from a close-by supermassive black hole binary would look like. With my talk behind me, the rest of the week seemed to proceed much quicker. My favorite part of the week was putting a face to all the names I have been working with for the past couple of years, people I met when I was just getting into the pulsar field, so the connection has a newfound personal significance. Additionally, meeting entirely new people was exciting and also very special.
What struck me is how broad and in-depth our collaboration is, with very detailed yet impactful research, like how the unique fingerprint from each pulsar, called the “pulse profile” in technical terms, can change over time. My favorite talk, given by Kai Schmitz at the University of Münster, was completely outside my area of expertise. It was about the causes of gravitational waves that lay outside what our current understanding of the universe predicts. This can include all sorts of strange stuff with cool-sounding names like cosmic strings and domain walls. Notably, over the summer I had the opportunity to meet and bond with his student Richard von Eckardstein during Richard’s one-month stay in Morgantown. He was also my roommate when I spent a week at the Green Bank Observatory as a part of the Pulsar Science Collaboratory summer camp!
The conference did eventually come to a close, but the science I learned and the exceptional researchers I connected with will continue to follow me as I mature as an astronomer. Science is a human endeavor, and that’s how it should be. The great scientists of NANOGrav give me confidence in the future of the pulsar astronomy field. I’m grateful to be part of such a passionate community sharing the common goal of pushing the frontiers of our knowledge.