Scientists just detected gravitational waves. We've entered a whole new world for astronomy

[Sabre]

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About 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes in a remote part of the universe collided with one another. The two objects were so massive that the interaction of their gravities distorted the space and time around them. If you could witness the event up close, it would be like living in a funhouse mirror.

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted that the distortion of spacetime caused by such a collision wouldn't stop at the site of the collision. Like a ripple on a pond, it would propagate outward in gravitational waves.

Today, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced, for the very first time, that they've directly observed a gravitational wave — proving Einstein right yet again.

"We have detected gravitational waves; we did it," David Reitze, executive director of LIGO said in a press conference Thursday to a cheering crowd. "It's exactly what Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted."

"It’s huge; it’s up there with the discovery of the Higgs particle," Cliff Burgess, a particle physicist at McMaster University who is unaffiliated with the LIGO project, tells me. "I bet it will be a Nobel Prize this year, maybe next year. It’s really a first class discovery."

Now if we could harness them!!!