Scientists Have Detected a Faint Hint of The Background Hum of The Universe - ScienceAlert

A single pulsar wouldn't be able to tell us much, but if these timing variations are observed in a number of pulsars, that could indicate the presence of gravitational waves.

The team's dataset is based on observations of 65 millisecond pulsars, the timing of which displayed characteristics consistent with what we'd expect from a gravitational wave background.

"The first hint of a gravitational wave background would be a signal like that seen in the International Pulsar Timing Array Data Release 2," says astrophysicist Bhal Chandra Joshi of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics in India.

"Then, with more data, the signal will become more significant and will show spatial correlations, at which point we will know it is a gravitational wave background.

We are very much looking forward to contributing several years of new data to the IPTA for the first time, to help achieve a gravitational wave background detection.".

That means there's a lot more science to do before we can definitively claim that the gravitational wave background has been detected.

That's because, if we have detected the gravitational wave background, the likeliest source is from collisions between some of the most massive objects in the Universe – supermassive black holes.