Quote

1. Gravitational waves were first predicted
> by Albert Einstein 100 years ago. It's taken that
> long for our technology to catch up to his
> brilliance and confirm the theory.
>
> 2. Scientists suspect that two merging black holes
> emit more energy in the form of gravitational
> waves in the last few minutes before they collide
> than a single star emits over billions of years.
>
> 3. Gravitational waves contract and expand the
> fabric of space-time, but only by a very small
> amount. The LIGO instruments (one shown below) are
> designed to detect a distortion that is 1 million
> times smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom.
>
> 4. Gravitational waves allow us to detect — for
> the first time — when two black holes are about
> to collide. The signal that LIGO scientists
> discovered from such a collision, released 50
> times more energy in the form of gravitational
> waves than all of the power put out by all of the
> stars in the universe put together!
>
> 5. But it's not just black holes that emit
> gravitational waves — it's any two bodies in
> orbit. That means the Sun and Earth emit
> gravitational waves too. But those waves carry 100
> billion times less energy than two merging black
> holes, making it impossible to detect with current
> technology.
>
> 6.Scientists also estimate that two black holes
> merge somewhere in the universe once every 15
> minutes. That's a lot of gravitational waves
> that we can now detect!
>
> 7. Before the first detection of gravitational
> waves, we had no way of knowing if black holes
> could merge. So this discovery doesn't just
> confirm Einstein's prediction. It also reveals a
> brand new behavior in the cosmos that we never
> knew existed before.