Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.
"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.
The gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time -- were created by the merging of two black holes, Reitze said. One black hole had the mass of 29 suns; the other was the equivalent of 36 suns. Each was perhaps 50 kilometers (30 miles) in diameter.
More than a billion years ago -- LIGO estimates about 1.3 billion -- the two collided at half the speed of light. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so the result traveled through the universe for that time before reaching Earth.
Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity in 1915, the theory that proposed space-time as a concept. The waves are a distortion of space-time.
However, in order for us to detect them, they needed to be created by a mammoth event -- for example, the collision of two black holes.
does this mean we'll be able to travel through time omg
