A 'magical' space-time ripple that wasn't believed, at first
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-magical...-believed.html


"It is seared in my brain," said Shoemaker, a top scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and head of the Advanced
LIGO Project, an international effort to uncover evidence of
gravitational waves.

Such waves are a measure of strain in space, an effect of the motion
of large masses that stretches the fabric of space-time—a way of
viewing space and time as a single, interweaved continuum.

The "chirp," as Shoemaker described the long-awaited wave, had
arrived while he was asleep.

But since the data analysis works in quasi-real-time, scientists
watching the data stream early in the work day in Europe saw it
immediately.

Two black holes spiraling into each other became a single black hole,
and the joining of these two giants curved the fabric of space-time
around them, ever so briefly.

"When the signal finally got to the Earth on September 14 we knew
within three minutes that our instruments had seen something really
different," said Shoemaker.



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