A new technique may sift out universe’s very first gravitational waves. Identifying primordial ripples would be key to understanding conditions of the early universe.
Primordial gravitational waves, produced nearly 13.8 billion years ago, still echo through the universe today. But they are drowned out by the crackle of gravitational waves produced by more recent events, such as colliding black holes and neutron stars.
Now a team led by an MIT graduate student has developed a method to tease out the very faint signals of primordial ripples from gravitational-wave data. Their results will be published this week in Physical Review Letters.
Gravitational waves are being detected on an almost daily basis by LIGO and other gravitational-wave detectors, but primordial gravitational signals are several orders of magnitude fainter than what these detectors can register. It’s expected that the next generation of detectors will be sensitive enough to pick up these earliest ripples.
In the next decade, as more sensitive instruments come online, the new method could be applied to dig up hidden signals of the universe’s first gravitational waves. The pattern and properties of these primordial waves could then reveal clues about the early universe, such as the conditions that drove inflation.
«If the strength of the primordial signal is within the range of what next-generation detectors can detect, which it might be, then it would be a matter of more or less just turning the crank on the data, using this method we’ve developed,» says Sylvia Biscoveanu, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. «These primordial gravitational waves can then tell us about processes in the early universe that are otherwise impossible to probe.»
Biscoveanu’s co-authors are Colm Talbot of Caltech, and Eric Thrane and Rory Smith of Monash University.
Story Source: Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Jennifer Chu. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.