gravitational-wave-bigFor the second time in history, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves. And just like that, a new era of astronomy is underway.

Like the first gravitational wave detected, scientists believe that the signal was created by the collision of two black holes, albeit a completely different binary black hole system than the first.

Both signals were detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). The LIGO team is made up of researchers from MIT and Caltech who led the design and construction and work together to operate the facility.

After ruling out any other possible source for the detected ripple, the LIGO team determined that the wave matched a single scenario among a bank of hundreds of thousands of known waveform possibilities: the collision of two black holes colliding at half the speed of light, 1.4 billion light years away.

“The first event was so beautiful that we almost couldn’t believe it. Now, the fact of having seen another gravitational wave proves that indeed we are observing a population of binary black holes in the universe. We […]

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