Gravitational Wave Discovery Opens 'New Window On The Universe' - HuffPo [View all]

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Gravitational Wave Discovery Opens 'New Window On The Universe'
Confirmation that the mysterious waves have been discovered ushers in a new era of astronomy and may answer big questions about black holes.
David Freeman & Jacqueline Howard
02/10/2016 01:15 pm ET | Updated 4 minutes ago

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Albert Einstein was right! He hypothesized a century ago that gravitational waves exist, and rumors have been swirling for months that scientists have detected them. Those rumors were confirmed in a press conference (above) on Thursday.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves," Dr. David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), said during the conference. "We did it."

His announcement was followed a round of applause by scientists and journalists gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., for the "status report" from researchers involved in the long quest to detect the waves.

Gravitational waves have been likened to ripples in space-time that flow outward at the speed of light when black holes or other massive celestial objects collide.

Reitze said that the detected waves were found on Sept. 14 and produced during the merger of two black holes that became a single, more massive spinning black hole.

"Our observation of gravitational waves accomplishes an ambitious goal set out over five decades ago to directly detect this elusive phenomenon and better understand the universe, and, fittingly, fulfills Einstein's legacy on the 100th anniversary of his general theory of relativity," Reitze said in a statement.

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More (w/Video): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gravitational-wave-discovery-would-open-new-window-on-the-universe_us_56bb5cc7e4b08ffac123659b