The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch– Homo Sapiens–would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass. Neil Degrasse Tyson
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Today, on June 14, 2015, the first direct evidence of gravitational waves was announced. This discovery follows over a century of research on the subject of gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. While physicists had known for almost 100 years that gravitational waves exist, they had not yet been able to detect them. That all changed when scientists used the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect gravitational waves from two black holes colliding some 1.3 billion light-years away. The detection of gravitational waves is a major scientific breakthrough that will enable scientists to test several key predictions of the general theory of relativity.

Source: Astrophysics For People In A Hurry

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