Quote:
Originally Posted by torsion
As for the Pulsar Timing Array, that is a very interesting results. According to the models, they should have seen something and they didn't. So that says something about the models, which in turn is very interesting.
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Unless I am misunderstanding the situation (which is entirely possible; probable even!), I'm not surprised that we didn't see a corresponding change in the Pulsar timing yet.
The gravitational waves reached us by travelling in a straight path 1.3 billion light years long (if "straight" means anything when we are talking about distortions of space itself!). Unless the pulsar we are monitoring happens to lie on the same "straight" path (VERY unlikely!), the path length from the Black Hole Merger to the Pulsar to Earth is longer than the "straight" path from the Black Hole Merger to Earth.
If the Pulsar happens to lie close to the straight path, between Earth and the merged Black Holes, it would have felt the gravitational waves before us, but as the cumulative path length is longer, the disruption to the regular pulsar frequency won't reach us for some time yet. If the Pulsar lies 100 light years beyond us, the gravitational waves won't reach it for another 100 years, and then it will take another 100 years for the Pulsar fluctuation signal to reach us.