{"id":123103,"date":"2021-05-27T13:23:20","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T20:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/spinning-neutron-stars-reveal-new-insights-into-elusive-continuous-gravitational-waves"},"modified":"2021-05-27T13:23:20","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T20:23:20","slug":"spinning-neutron-stars-reveal-new-insights-into-elusive-continuous-gravitational-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/spinning-neutron-stars-reveal-new-insights-into-elusive-continuous-gravitational-waves","title":{"rendered":"Spinning Neutron Stars Reveal New Insights Into Elusive Continuous Gravitational Waves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/spinning-neutron-stars-reveal-new-insights-into-elusive-continuous-gravitational-waves.gif\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometer-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, the team have witnessed the explosive collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Recent studies, however, have been looking for something quite different: the elusive signal from a solitary, rapidly-spinning neutron star.<\/p>\n<p>Take a star similar in size to the Sun, squash it down to a ball about twenty kilometers across \u2014 roughly the distance from Melbourne airport to the city center \u2014 and you\u2019d get a neutron star: the densest object in the known Universe. Now set your neutron star spinning at hundreds of revolutions per second and listen carefully. If your neutron star isn\u2019t perfectly spherical, it will wobble about a bit, and you\u2019ll hear a faint \u201chumming\u201d sound. Scientists call this a continuous gravitational wave.<\/p>\n<p>So far, these humming neutron stars have proved elusive. As OzGrav postdoctoral researcher Karl Wette from the Australian National University explains: Imagine you\u2019re out in the Australian bush listening to the wildlife. The gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star collisions we\u2019ve observed so far are like squawking cockatoos \u2014 loud and boisterous, they\u2019re pretty easy to spot!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometer-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}