| Sorry to disappoint you. Watching some 68 stable millisecond pulsars for pulse-delays over a long time let the NANOGrav collaboration spot quite a lot of gravitational radiation from heavy bodies (heavy as in billions of solar masses each) in mutual orbits lasting months to years. LIGO, Virgo, and Kagra are sensitive to much quicker mutual orbits, where a single orbit is a fraction of a second. This also implies a much lower maximum mass for the bodies, somewhere between about 2 and 30 solar masses. A pair of bodies of lower mass can have a quicker orbit; heavier bodies will collide and merge instead. > sail or surf The sources of the type of gravitational radiation NANOGrav (and other pulsar timing array collaborations like CPTA, EPTA and PPTA) is sensitive to are scattered randomly across the sky at random distances and with orbits in random orientations. There is unlikely to be a directional bias in our part of the universe. The results are close to what everyone expected, although there may be support for a greater than expected count of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries. Binarization channels -- the ways in which a pair of initially-separated SMBHs go into ~months-long orbits with one another will get more study. This is of particular use in understanding the formation and merger of galaxies. Ultimately this is a mostly confirmation of 3-spacelike+1-timelike dimension General Relativity as a good theory for our universe at the largest scales. "Hyperspace lanes" have more dimensions right in the name, so I guess the NANOGrav 15-year study results seem to leave them in the land of fantasy. At best, one can imagine a variety of non-prosaic explanations for the unexpectedly high count of gravitational waves could mean sources other than SMBHs (some early universe phase transitions, that our spacetime has topological defects, unexpected action during cosmic inflation). None of that really invites realistic thinking about "sailing" or "surfing" any more than a random scattering of SMBH binaries. The prosaic explanation for the unexpectedly large number of SMBH-like signals is simply that black holes tended grow large in dustier regions than expected. Finally, for the most part (i.e., in not-very-dusty regions of space) light waves and gravitational waves move at the same speed, so at first glance it doesn't seem likely that gravitational waves would help one with FTL travel. |