An international collaboration of researchers including numerous scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany has produced the most sensitive map of the gravitational wave sky. To achieve this goal, the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array collaboration analysed 4.5 years of data taken with the MeerKAT radio telescope - one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world. The collaboration presents its latest results in a series of three papers published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society”.
Fig. 1: The figure shows a MeerKAT antenna in front of an artistic representation of supermassive black holes and the space-time distorted by their impact. The pulsar timing observations with the MeerKAT telescope make it possible to calculate the gravitational wave backgrounds from this data.
© Carl Knox, OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology und South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)