Northern Ireland scientist discovers role in black hole shock waves

This week, scientists published evidence that supermassive black holes send out shock waves that distort space and time as they orbit each other.

One of the groups that made the discovery is the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOgrav) Collaboration, chaired by Dr Stephen Taylor, a Northern Ireland native.

The 35-year-old credits his love of all things space with watching a partial solar eclipse during the summer of 1999, which also coincided with the 30th anniversary of the first moon landing.

“The combination of these things and us learning about them in school — it really fired up my imagination,” said Dr. Taylor.

He continued his education at Wallace High School in his hometown of Lisburn and his passion for science, he says, has never left him.

‘I’ve always been fascinated by it and that has really played a part in the subjects I choose for GCSEs and A-levels,’ he said.

Crossroads of paths

Whilst studying for his A level Dr Taylor gained work experience at a laser laboratory in Oxford.

It is there that he had a chance meeting with another scientist from Northern Ireland whose work played an important part in his later research.

While at Oxford, she had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell who discovered pulsars while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge.

Pulsars are dead stars that rotate and send out bursts of radio signals at extremely precise intervals.

“He gave a fantastic speech and I went up afterwards spitting out popular science I’d read, thinking I knew it all,” she said.

“But he was really nice and humored me, if I’m being honest.”

The pulsars would then be measured by Dr Taylor and his team in this latest paper.

“I think it’s really nice that the Northern Irish are on both ends of that – because I certainly haven’t heard accents like mine giving these kinds of scientific interviews or talks,” she said.

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Dr. Taylor then went on to do a BA at Oxford, followed by a PhD at Cambridge in gravitational waves.

“At the time, the idea was still theoretical. There were traditional projects like LIGO” – the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory – “but people were more focused on other aspects of physics.

“But my philosophy was, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to enjoy it and that was what appealed to me the most.”

‘nasa mad’

The first in his family to go to college, Dr. Taylor said his parents always encouraged him to make choices that made him happy.

From there, NASA-crazy Dr. Taylor got the opportunity to work at the space agency’s jet propulsion laboratory before spending some time at the California Institute of Technology.

This led him to begin taking leadership roles, chairing a working group dealing with gravitational waves and gaining a permanent position at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

His team studied the signals omitted by pulsars and the effects of gravitational waves on their frequencies.

Dr. Taylor described radio beams from pulsars as beams of light from a lighthouse. When the frequency with which they hit the Earth changes, this shows gravitational waves as Einstein predicted.

He said the most plausible cause of these waves is the orbit of supermassive black holes.

“We’ve seen a lot of hints along the way, but this is the first piece of evidence in this type of dataset that’s really exciting.”

Dr Taylor said that, due to the frequencies, these black holes would be billions of times more massive than the sun and would be in the centers of galaxies.

“I never thought I’d get involved in something like this. It was fun to participate in the physics and math problems, but I never thought it would get to this point,” he said.

“No Roadblocks”

Dr Taylor said the support of family, friends and his schools played a huge role.

“They never set up roadblocks. I mean, if someone said they wanted to become a theoretical astrophysicist and try to make a big discovery, a lot of people would say, ‘Take it hard.’

“But no one ever really said that.”

But it’s not all easy for people in Dr. Taylor’s camp.

“It’s not like in the movies, with a lot of scientists around a computer saying, ‘We did it, this is it.’ There’s no eureka moment.

“This line of work is about much more than small successes. Big breakthroughs happen infrequently and often take a long time.”

Dr. Taylor looks forward to collaborating with similar projects around the world, combining their readings to learn more about these black holes and their gravitational effects.