Alicia Sintes
Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of the Balearic Islands in the Department of Physics & IAC3, and member of the Relativity and Gravitation group, which is part of the LIGO and GEO consortia and the e-LISA and Einstein Telescope projects
Today is an exciting day. It is clear that gravitational astronomy is here to stay and that it will revolutionise our current understanding of the universe.
More than seven years have passed since the first direct observation of gravitational waves with the LIGO detectors. Now, the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) consortium has opened a new window on the cosmos by making observations in the nanohertz band. They have evidence for a stochastic background of gravitational waves from binary systems of supermassive black holes. That is, from the merging of galaxies.
In the history of astronomy, every time a new window in the electromagnetic spectrum has been opened, there have been great discoveries. Gravitational waves provide us with a new spectrum and with information complementary to that of light. The Pulsar Timing Array opens the window to low frequencies; the ground-based detectors (LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA) cover high frequencies and with them, phenomena involving stellar mass bodies. I am looking forward to the launch of the future LISA space mission (2037) to cover the frequency band between PTA and ground-based ones, as well as the third generation detectors with which to do high-precession gravitational wave astronomy, and with the observation of millions of events per year.
Today, I congratulate IPTA for the results obtained after so many years of observation.