Ethnoarchaeology Continued from Page 9
NANOGrav finds firs wave background In data gathered and analyzed over 13 years, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has found an intriguing low-frequency signal that may be from gravitational waves, as reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
During her stay in Oaxaca, Cheri Price interviewed this potter to connect today’s crafting methods with historical artifacts. The potter lives in San Bartolo Coyotepec, which is known for black pottery. Photo courtesy of Cheri Price.
How did the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship help you on your way? I have received the FLAS three times, and I’m so grateful for it. It’s easily the highlight of my PhD career and postacademia. When you go to another country to learn another language, typically you’re surrounded by that language, and the acquisition of that language becomes a little bit easier. Not so much with Mixtec, and with some of the indigenous languages. You do need to have more than one shot at it. There are so many regional variants to Mixtec that it’s hard to become immersed. Why Mexico? What drove you to study artifacts south of the border? That’s a personal question in the sense that my grandma was from Mexico. I did not grow up speaking Spanish. My grandmother only spoke it with her sisters. They were the impetus for me to learn Spanish, because I would hear my name and then I would hear them laughing. I was like, I need to figure out what’s going on here! Later on, I went to college and learned Spanish in Mexico. I figured the best way to learn it would be to be thrown in and completely immersed. It kicked off my love affair with Mexico and wanting to learn more about and talk to as many people as I can. I am fascinated by pre-Hispanic cultures and the material objects they left behind. And, this has been an amazing way to learn about my own family and culture. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science 10 • IN FOCUS • January, 2021
NANOGrav has been able to rule out some effects other than gravitational waves, such as interference from the matter in our own solar system or certain errors in the data collection. These newest findings set up direct detection of gravitational waves as the possible next major step, which would be the first-ever detection of low-frequency David Kaplan gravitational waves. NANOGrav is a collaboration of over 100 U.S. and Canadian astrophysicists, including a UWM group led by astrophysicists David Kaplan and Sarah Vigeland. The paper was led by Joseph Simon, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and UWM alum (PhD 2017).
Sarah Vigeland
“It is incredibly exciting to see such a strong signal emerge from the data,” Simon said. “However, because the gravitational-wave signal we are searching for spans the entire duration of our observations, we need to carefully understand our noise. This leaves us in an interesting place, where we can strongly rule out some known noise sources, but we cannot say whether the signal is indeed from gravitational waves. For that, we need more data.” Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the movements of incredibly massive objects, such as black holes or neutron stars. Astronomers cannot observe these waves with a telescope like they do stars and galaxies. Instead, they measure the effects passing gravitational waves have, namely tiny changes to the precise position of objects – including the position of the Earth itself.
