Gravitational Waves

This week's news includes the spectacular announcement that Einstein's prediction of 100 years ago has been proven true. Gravitational waves are real.

Here is physicist Carlo Rovelli writing about what this means (LIGO is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory):

"The wave that LIGO has now been able to observe is the product of a catastrophic event: the merging of two black holes, each having the mass of several dozen Suns. The energy their spiraling impact radiated into space was that of three Suns vaporized in a fraction of a second. This cosmic explosion raised a galactic tsunami that has traveled more than 1 billion years through interstellar space to swash weakly at LIGO’s shore."