NANOGrav: Fluctuations in space captured in real-time

Heading into the holiday weekend, social media exploded with news that a massive discovery was going to be announced on Thursday June 29 by the NANOgrav collaboration. This network of North American observatories had been watching the sky in radio light for over 15 years and now they had something big to share.

For those who’d been following the team’s work, hopes were high. This team had been carefully monitoring the metronome-like ticking of radio pulsars to see if they could see alterations in the fabric of space-time that are caused…