The Milky Way Is a Gravitational Wave Detector

LIGO uses 4-kilometre laser arms to detect gravitational waves at hundreds of hertz. Pulsar timing arrays use millisecond pulsars scattered across the Milky Way — arms measured in light-years — to detect gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies, ten orders of magnitude lower. In June 2023, five independent pulsar timing arrays simultaneously announced the detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background. The Milky Way itself was the detector.

7 July 2023 · 18 min · Sebastian Spicker

What Black Hole Images Actually Show (and Why a Wormhole Would Look Different)

The EHT images of M87* and Sgr A* are remarkable not because they surprised us, but because they confirmed a century-old prediction at microarcsecond precision. The more interesting question: what would a wormhole look like? Completely different — and we have never seen that.

17 October 2022 · 8 min · Sebastian Spicker