Okay, this is a really clever fix. Essentially, detecting the gravitational waves of supermassive black holes directly is impossible. The waves of the frequency are too big and too slow to observe from our fixed position.

The first gravitational waves ever recorded were from the collision of black holes and other massive objects. Basically, really intense, brief stuff that you just come across by chance, but can’t really seek out.

The solution was to look at pulsars, which give off regular, predictable radio bursts. So what they did is measure the slight distortion from a bunch of different pulsars throughout the galaxy and combine the data to get a sense of the galactic ripples created by supermassive black holes.

It’s not enough to pinpoint a location of the source yet, but it’s enough to develop a technique for finding them.

Science is cool.