Ride the wave

Look: Largest-ever catalog of gravitational-wave events

by Robin Bea
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
T. Dietrich (Potsdam University and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), N. Fischer, S. Ossokine, H. Pfeiffer (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics)

In 2015, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) captured the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, more than a century after the phenomenon was first proposed.

The SXS (Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes) Project

Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1905 and predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravitational waves are distortions in spacetime created by the movement of extremely massive objects.

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