Even the strongest gravitational waves that pass through the planet, created by the distant collisions of black holes, only stretch and compress each mile of Earth’s surface by one-thousandth the diameter of an atom. It’s hard to conceive of how small these ripples in the fabric of spacetime are, let alone detect them. But in 2016, after physicists spent decades building and fine-tuning an instrument called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they got one.
With nearly 100 gravitational waves now recorded, the landscape of invisible black holes is unfurling. But that’s only part of the story.
Gravitational wave detectors are picking up
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