Cosmic Bulletins: Two Major Discoveries Rock Science

Cosmic Bulletins: Two Major Discoveries Rock Science Nearly a century ago, Einstein came up with the idea of gravitational waves. Now, in a discovery that physicists are calling "extraordinary" and "spectacular," observers at the South Pole have found the first direct evidence they exist

The Theory of General Relativity seemed truly bizarre when Albert Einstein first articulated it 99 years ago: gravity, the great physicist declared, was no longer to be seen as a force, but rather as the warping of “spacetime,” an amalgam of those two formerly independent concepts. The theory also predicted that violent events should trigger gravitational waves, which would set spacetime rippling, like a vat of cosmic jello. There has been some circumstantial evidence of those ripples, involving changes in orbits of binary stars, but what’s always been missing is a smoking gun, direct observational measurement of a gravitational wave