A Big Deal for Physics [See the fantastic article from
the New Yorker on the topic]:
“Just over a billion
years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided.
…The waves rippled
outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose,
evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years
ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning
to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A
hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the
species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and
fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous
detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then,
on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European
Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian
postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the
first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the
Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data
remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the
most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a
trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint
whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington,
D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct
observation of gravitational waves.”