Astrophysicists prepare for age of multi-messenger astronomy, build galaxy catalog to study black holes

Led by postdoctoral fellow researcher Maria Charisi, a team of international researchers known as the NANOGrav collaboration has created a catalog of 45,000 galaxies to detect gravitational waves created by pairs of black holes known as binaries. Using pulsars--the most precise clocks of the sky--a galactic scale detector dubbed a pulsar timing array and infrared data from across the sky, Charisi used the catalog to input hypothetical binaries to measure differences in the masses of the two blac...