NANOGrav

Introducing a first-of-its-kind breakthrough to a global audience

Year
2022–2023
Role
Strategy and design
Status
Live

NANOGrav is an international collaboration that studies the universe by timing pulsars with extreme precision. On June 29, 2023, it announced evidence for a background of low-frequency gravitational waves passing through our galaxy, drawn from 15 years of data. Groups across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia announced together, and the news traveled around the world. NANOGrav knew a result like this would draw people who had never heard of pulsar timing, and it needed a site ready to explain it.

At Sandbox, we started in April 2022 and had the site live ahead of the announcement. We refreshed the brand and built a site the collaboration uses both to explain itself to the public and to run its day-to-day communication. I led the strategy and design, including the updated brand.

The result

In the week of the announcement, 41,000 people from 157 countries visited the site, and 9 in 10 of them were there for the first time. Three years on, it’s still NANOGrav’s public face. The collaboration maintains it independently, and members post their own news and events.

41K
Visitors in announcement week, 9 in 10 of them new
157
Countries reached in announcement week

Making hard science approachable

Nanohertz gravitational waves and pulsar timing aren’t everyday concepts for most of us. The site had to give newcomers a way into the science without watering it down.

Custom illustration carries the concepts that resist a photograph. An interactive glossary runs throughout, defining technical terms right in the text, so readers never have to leave the page to look one up. Each science topic gets its own short, plain-language introduction.

Laid over photography for posters and other graphics, the dot arcs carry two readings at once: radio waves arriving from space, and the Hellings–Downs curve the collaboration was built to detect.

Line chart, ‘Correlation of pulse arrival times by the angle between pulsars’: the curve starts at 0.5, falls through zero, bottoms out near minus 0.15, then rises again to about 0.25.
The Green Bank Telescope, its white lattice dish tilted skyward above a dark ridge, with arcs of teal dots curving across the sky above it.
The site on a phone: a Highlights list of NANOGrav papers, each with its publication month, journal, linked title and first author.
Illustration of Earth ringed by radio telescopes and satellites on faint orbital rings, with pulsars beaming and gravitational waves rippling as wavy lines across a field of distant galaxies and black holes.

A site the collaboration can run itself

NANOGrav is large and spread across many institutions. Its content changes often, so we built the site for the community to keep current on its own. Members contribute news, post events, and update their own bios, and a site editor approves what goes live. The site stays consistent, and no update waits on a developer.

A radio telescope dish on its mount, tilted against a plain sky, in black and white. The CHIME telescope's long half-pipe reflectors under a deep blue twilight sky, the moon above them. Collaboration members around a table of laptops, mid-conversation, the NANOGrav dot pattern on the wall behind them. About thirty-five members of the NANOGrav collaboration gathered on outdoor steps for a group photograph. The Green Bank Telescope on a distant ridge at sunset, wildflowers in the foreground against a violet sky.

Recognition

The New York Times carried the detection on its science page the day it was announced. Funding agencies, space agencies, research institutions, and astronomers marked the result on their own channels.

The New York Times science page: 'The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find', above a photograph of the Very Large Array's dishes at dusk with wildflowers in the foreground.
The New York Times, June 28, 2023.
The Washington Post opinion page: 'I’m a physicist. Last week’s gravitational waves announcement sent me reeling.', above an illustration of a black hole warping a blue grid of spacetime.
The Washington Post, July 6, 2023.

Congratulations to NANOGrav for detecting evidence that gravitational waves fill the cosmos. These ripples in the fabric of space happen when massive objects like black holes circle one another before colliding. The result brings us closer to understanding how galaxies evolve.

NASA @NASA

Major announcement about the universe! Using radio telescope observations of burned-out stars, the #NSFfunded @NANOGrav team found evidence that low-frequency gravitational waves are distorting the fabric of physical reality known as space-time.

U.S. National Science Foundation @NSF

The news is out! The @NANOGrav pulsar timing array collaboration has detected a background of cosmic gravitational waves rippling through our Universe! Let’s talk about it!

Katie Mack @AstroKatie

Big news from the astrophysics community! Scientists have found evidence of a low-frequency “hum” of #GravitationalWaves rippling through the cosmos.

Canadian Space Agency @csa_asc

Gravitational waves play a cosmic symphony as they pass through our galaxy. Today @NANOGrav released the results of 15 years of data in a set of papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The SETI Institute @SETIInstitute

After 15 years of carefully observing stars called #pulsars throughout our galaxy, the @NANOGrav collaboration has “heard” the perpetual chorus of #GravitationalWaves rippling through our universe.

Simons Foundation @SimonsFdn