Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time created by the interaction of massive objects in space, such as black holes and neutron stars. Their existence was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his 1916 paper describing his theory of general relativity. In 2015, scientists made the first detection of gravitational waves, observing ripples from the collision of two black holes. The discovery won astrophysicists Kip Thorne, Barry Baris and Rainer Weiss the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics. Subsequent observations have also detected gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars. Learn more about gravitational waves here.
Related Topics: Black Holes, Dark Matter, The Theory of Relativity in Space
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"It doesn't require any new technology development, which is almost unheard of for solving a LIGO instrumentation problem."
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We still can't see dark matter. But what if we can hear it?
Black holes smashing together may churn dark matter "butter," scientists say.
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The universe is humming with ripples in spacetime: Scientists just doubled our catalog of black hole and neutron star collisions
The catalog of gravitational waves "heard" by LIGO, KAGRA and Virgo has doubled with detections of spacetime ripples.
How fast is the universe actually expanding? Ripples in spacetime could finally solve 'Hubble tension'
Using gravitational waves as a measure of the universe's rate of expansion could solve the biggest headache in physics, the so-called "Hubble tension."
Starlight warped in the fabric of spacetime could help us find hidden black holes dancing together
Flashes of gravitationally lensed starlight could act as cosmic lighthouses revealing the presence of binary supermassive black holes in close orbit.
Watch dead neutron stars smash together in new NASA supercomputer simulation
"We studied the last several orbits before the merger, when the entwined magnetic fields undergo rapid and dramatic changes, and modeled potentially observable high-energy signals."
