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Largest scientific instrument ever built to prove Einstein's theory of general relativity - TelegraphThe mission, a collaboration between Nasa and the European Space Agency, will use three spacecraft flying in formation while orbiting the sun, with each housing floating cubes of gold platinum.
Pulsar Grid to Prove Einstein's Gravitational Wave Theory - Fermi has discovered several in the Milky Way - SoftpediaAn important thing to know about these pulsars is that they are extremely precise. In other words, their sweeps occur at clearly defined, periodic intervals, and some astronomers even go as far as saying that the stars are the most accurate natural clocks of the Universe. What investigators are hoping to accomplish at this point is the creation of a Global Positioning System (GPS) of sorts that will use the periodic sweeps of several pulsars in order to look for gravitational waves. At the forefront of this research, however, is NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which is able to detect the highly energetic photons making up this type of electromagnetic radiation.
Astronomers get new tools for gravitational-wave detectionThe breakthrough came when an instrument aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope began surveying the sky in 2008. This instrument located hundreds of gamma-ray-emitting objects throughout our Galaxy, and astronomers suspected many of these could be millisecond pulsars. Paul Ray of the Naval Research Laboratory initiated an international collaboration to use radio telescopes to confirm the identity of these objects as millisecond pulsars.
"The data from Fermi were like a buried-treasure map," Ransom said. "Using our radio telescopes to study the objects located by Fermi, we found 17 millisecond pulsars in three months. Large-scale searches had taken 10-15 years to find that many," Ransom exclaimed. "Fermi showed us where to look."
"This is a huge help in our effort to use millisecond pulsars to detect gravitational waves," Ransom said. The more such pulsars scientists can find and observe over time, the more likely they are to detect gravitational waves, he explained. He said that astronomers now have barely enough millisecond pulsars to make a convincing gravitational-wave detection.