Dead, spinning stars can be used as massive, naturally occurring radio antennas to catch ripples in the fabric of spacetime.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
High Sensitivity Methodologies to Detect Radio Band Gravitational Waves
arXiv · 2603.26848
The Takeaway
Detecting gravitational waves usually requires billion-dollar laser facilities on Earth. This new method shows that pulsars can naturally convert these ripples into radio signals within their intense magnetic fields, essentially turning the entire galaxy into a giant gravitational wave detector.
From the abstract
Gravitational waves (GWs) can resonate with magnetic fields through the Gertsenshtein-Zeldovich effect, producing electromagnetic signals at the same frequency. In pulsar magnetospheres, this conversion may yield a faint radio-band signal that could be detected. In this work, we focus on two specific pulsars, PSR J1856-3754 and PSR J0720-3125, and use numerical simulations to evaluate how well the FAST and SKA2-MID telescopes could detect such signals. We consider transient events, including pri