Scientists at the Australian National University are starting to do the cosmic equivalent of trying to find the squeak of a mouse in the midst of a stampeding herd of elephants.
A team is trying to identify the hum made by relatively small events far into space. Scientists have already picked up the reverberations of big events like huge "black holes" or neutron stars colliding but they now want to hear the continuous sound of events on stars which are the size of Canberra but have the mass of the sun.
The research team say they want "want to capture this steady soundtrack of the stars over the thunderous noise of massive black holes and dense neutron stars colliding."
If successful, it would be the first detection of a gravitational wave event that didn't involve the collision of massive objects like black holes or neutron stars.
Professor Susan Scott of the ANU Research School of Physics said the collision of dense neutron stars sent a "burst" of gravitational waves rippling through the Universe.
"Neutron stars are mystery objects," she said.
"We don't really understand what they are made up of, or how many types of them exist. But what we do know is that when they collide, they send incredible bursts of gravitational waves across the Universe.
"In contrast, the gentle hum of a spinning neutron star is very faint and almost impossible to detect."
The aim of the work is simply to understand more about the great mysteries of the Universe, and thereby to understand more about where we fit into it.
"If we can manage to detect this hum, we'll be able to look deep into the heart of a neutron star and unlock its secrets," Dr Karl Wette, one of the researchers, said.
Professor Scott added: "Neutron stars represent the densest form of matter in the Universe before a black hole will form."
"Searching for their gravitational waves allows us to probe nuclear matter states that simply can't be produced in laboratories on Earth," she said.
