Maura McLaughlin, Eberly Distinguished Professor and Chair in the West Virginia University Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The grant, Collaborative Research: Building the Next-Generation NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Array with the DSA-2000 was awarded to McLaughlin and team as part of the Windows on the Universe program at NSF. The dedicated $313,000 will support multi-faceted research and training programs across the country, involving a new radio telescope array called the Deep Synoptic Array, or DSA-2000.
DSA-2000 is anticipated to lead the world as a sensitive radio survey telescope and multi-messenger astronomy discovery engine. Consisting of 2,000 five-meter dishes, placed across an isolated, quiet valley in Nevada, the array will be used to characterize the nanohertz gravitational wave universe that scientific collaborations like North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) study.
In 2023, the NSF-funded NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center, of which McLaughlin is co-Director, released results from over 15 years of research that confirmed the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves caused by merging supermassive black holes. These mergers produce gravitational waves or ripples in the fabric of space time. The collaboration uses pulsars, or rapidly rotating super dense neutron stars that emit beams of radiation, as cosmic clocks to detect and study low frequency gravitational waves sweeping across the universe.
This award will offer WVU students the unique opportunity to play critical roles in the earliest science done with this extremely sensitive new telescope.
Maura McLaughlin
To support the momentum of the discovery, McLaughlin and collaborators have been awarded NSF funds to develop infrastructure to enable pulsar timing observations for low-frequency gravitational wave studies with DSA-2000. Additionally, funding will support hands-on training for undergraduate and graduate students working on the development of hardware and algorithms. Funds will also enable the development and deployment of pulsar timing instrumentation and pipelines, and prototype hardware during construction of the array. McLaughlin emphasizes “This award will offer WVU students the unique opportunity to play critical roles in the earliest science done with this extremely sensitive new telescope.”
NSF Award Number: 2511108
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