The Nanohertz Background in the Ether Plenum: The Scalar Reading, the Tensor Result, and the Residue the Arrays Bound

The Theory of NeoGravity states a physical cause for gravitation. Space is not an empty void; it is filled, everywhere, by the Ether Plenum. Every body gives off radiation without pause — the Sun, the Earth, a stone in the hand — most of it invisible, across the whole spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays. That radiation carries momentum outward, into the Plenum. The Plenum returns it, inward, on the body that sent it out; Newton’s third law allows nothing else. That returned load is gravity, the Radiative Undertow. It is compressive, so the Plenum settles denser toward a mass, and a body falls by answering to the state of the Plenum where it is. Nothing acts across empty space. In this account the curvature of a four-dimensional spacetime metric describes the Plenum’s settled profile and does not cause it: Newton’s potential, Einstein’s metric and the gravitational field are three names for one state of the Ether Plenum under load.

In June 2023 five pulsar timing array collaborations independently reported a stochastic nanohertz signal in the arrival times of millisecond pulsar pulses. The standard interpretation attributes it to a background of spin-two gravitational waves radiated by inspiraling supermassive black hole binaries. According to the Theory of NeoGravity the wander is the Plenum's own oscillation, read at the Earth as refraction; what the data settle, at overwhelming odds, is that one correlated thing is there, and what they barely lean on is what kind of thing it is.

Before its wave sector was derived, NeoGravity required a different reading: the residuals are refractive fluctuations produced by pressure and density oscillations in the Ether Plenum, driven by the varying load returned upon orbiting binaries. The source population is unchanged, and the frequency band follows from first principles: supermassive binaries at separations of one hundredth to one tenth of a parsec drive oscillations at about one to one hundred nanohertz.

The difficulty is the Hellings–Downs angular correlation, whose distinguishing property is that it turns negative, reaching minus 0.152 at a pulsar-pair separation of 82.6 degrees and crossing zero at 49.2 and 121.8 degrees. That anticorrelation is the geometrical fingerprint of transverse-traceless spin-two radiation, while a compressible fluid supporting scalar density waves predicts a correlation positive everywhere. The data favor the tensor pattern by a Bayes factor of about two, against the same data favoring a correlated background over uncorrelated noise at better than 10¹⁴. The detection is overwhelming; the polarization determination is not.

The detection of the background is overwhelming and the determination of its polarization is not: the data favor the tensor pattern by a Bayes factor of about two, where the same data favor a correlated background over uncorrelated noise at better than 10¹⁴.

Five statements say what the Ether Plenum is. They are set down before any result, in one place, so that nothing can be slipped in afterwards to rescue a number that comes out wrong; that is their purpose, and the reader is entitled to hold the theory to it.

The first two say nothing that is not already true of water, or of steel, or of air. The Plenum is neither created nor destroyed; and when it is pushed, it moves. Any physicist would grant those two of any material at all, and they cost the theory nothing. It is the three that follow that commit it. Squeeze the Plenum and it presses back, with exactly one third of the energy it holds; and that fraction is not chosen but forced, because whatever fills it has no mass. Twist it and it answers as a fluid does that remembers, for a moment, having been a solid: stiff against a quick disturbance, yielding to a slow one. And a body holds the Plenum about it denser than it is far away, by an amount fixed by the body’s mass; matter and Plenum trade momentum through that and through nothing else.