A European team with the participation of the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and Radio Astronomy, together with Indian and Japanese astronomers, has discovered the first evidence of a gravitational wave background originating from the formation and evolution of the universe and its galaxies. The team used the European Pulsar Timing Array and the Indian Pulsar Timing Array to observe gravitational waves at wavelengths of several light years over a period of 25 years. The target of the observations was not gravitational waves directly, but 25 pulsar stars distributed in the Milky Way, which form the largest gravitational wave detector to date. Pulsars rotate very quickly around their axis and can be measured from Earth via periodic radio pulses that are as regular as clockwork. Gravitational waves influence the fabric of space and time. If gravitational waves meet pulsars, they can be measured indirectly via the changed clock frequency of the pulsars.
According to the gold-standard of physics, the measured