Not Just Waves but Black Holes (Go LIGO!!)

"This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger." This final line of a paper published this morning in Physical Review Letters by the Laser Interferometer Gravitaional-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration sums up today's press conference announcement. 14 years after their search began and 100 years after Einstein predicted them, gravitational waves were detected. This would be headline news on its own, but LIGO got in a second f...