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In the very early universe, physics was weird. A process known as \u201cinflation,\u201d where best we understand the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of that weird physics. Now, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science have sifted through 15 years of pulsar timing data in order to put some constraints on what that physics looks like.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The fifteen years of data come from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves or NANOGrav. NANOGrav\u2019s goal is to use an unconventional way to detect gravitational waves \u2013 by looking at pulsars. These fast-spinning objects are commonly used as \u201cclocks\u201d in astronomical terms. Back in 1983, a pair of astronomers (Ronald Hellings and George Downs) developed a method by which astronomers could use an array of these pulsars to check for shifts that gravitational waves might cause.<\/p>\n More recent work has seen pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) such as NANOGrav successfully identify a specific flavor of gravitational wave known as the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). The SGWB is similar in concept to the cosmic microwave background \u2013 a consistent glow from the early universe that astronomers can see as a series of microwaves coming from all directions at once.<\/p>\n \n