Gravitational waves make pulsars shimmer, a phenomenon that's inspiring a cheap new way of hunting for the elusive ripples in spacetime.
The search for gravitational waves is one of the great scientific endeavors of modern times. Their discovery will allow astronomers to peer out into the cosmos in an entirely new way and to study exotic new phenomena such as collisions between black holes and neutron stars.
On Earth, physicists have built expensive detectors that can measure the way gravitational waves squeeze and stretch spacetime as they pass by. Despite years of study and millions of dollars of investment, these machines have found precisely nothing.
But there's another way of hunting for gravitational waves: to look for the effect on pulsars as the waves race through the galaxy like ripples on a pond.
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