Physicists have just confirmed the first detection of ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves.
The discovery was made using two laser detectors that recorded gravitational waves coming from a black hole collision that happened 1.3 billion years ago.
When the two massive objects collided, they produced a ripple of waves through spacetime that have finally reached the Earth.
Here's what the actual rippling signal looked like. It was detected by the two labs that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
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"We know its real because seven milliseconds later, we saw this same thing in the Hanford detector," Gabriela González, spokesperson from LIGO, said during a press conference on Feb. 11.
"You can see that these signals have oscillations that grow in frequency and amplitude and then settle down," Gonzalez said. It looks exactly like the prediction that Einstein made 100 years ago, she added.
You can see how the two waves match up here:
And here you can see an animation of what the waves looked like:
