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The event that confirmed Einstein’s wildest prediction happened as life on Earth was just getting started

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Rob Ludacer

Deep in space, 1.3 billion years ago, two black holes smashed together. When they merged, they emitted some of their energy as gravitational waves.

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Here on Earth, just five months ago, a massive detector at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US picked up the signal showing these gravitational waves. 

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but he thought them far too feeble to detect as they undulated across the universe.

The members of LIGO — a 15-nation, 1,000-scientist, $1 billion experiment that has searched for signs of the phenomenon since 2002 — announced today that Einstein was right about his prediction, but wrong about one thing: They were not too feeble to detect at all. The extremely sensitive equipment at LIGO picked up this nearly imperceptible ripple in spacetime, a monumental finding. 

Gabriela González, spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, emphasized at the press conference how incredibly far away the signal they measured was. 

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The signal LIGO picked up on September 14, 2015 — 1.3 billion years after they were born. NSF

"From the amplitude of the waveform, you can tell how far away this system was. It was more than a billion light years away," she said.

"This merger happened 1.3 billion years ago when multicellular life here on earth was just beginning to spread. And this signal took a billion years to come to earth and produce this tiny distortion in our detectors that we are very proud to measure." 

When the black holes collided, it was the Mesoproterozoic Era here on earth. 

Life was just beginning to develop into multi-celled organisms. 

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Stable continents were forming, birthing mountains as they crashed together. 

Photosynthesis was just developing, and oxygen began building up in the atmosphere. 

The oldest fossils we've collected come from this era — algae and simple eukaryotes. 

Humans (Homo sapiens) didn't grace the planet until a mere 200,000 years ago, ages and ages after those black holes collided and sent the signal that would eventually reach us.

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The history of life on earth. LadyofHats/Wikimedia Commons

While life here on Earth was just beginning, two black holes were changing the future of astronomy, which humans couldn't begin to comprehend until we developed the methods to detect the collision — 1.3 billion years later. 

Physics
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