In the very early universe, physics were weird. A process known as inflation, during which the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of those 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 physics looks like.
Perfect timing, as just this past week I’ve been wondering about these low-frequency gravitational waves that were announced with a splash last summer, then I heard nothing, that is until now.
It takes a while to go through the data and find specific parameters you’re looking for. This is radio astronomy, using data from antenna telescopes all over the world. For comparison in a similar type of project, it took two years to crunch the numbers from the Event Horizon Telescope and resolve a fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole in M87.