Plots of strain vs time for detectors at LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, and the combined signals.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/063/820/866/005/771/original/44dac102195f46a9.jpeg
Gravitational waves were first detected by LIGO #OTD in 2015, 100 years after they were predicted by Einstein.
This discovery, announced the following February, marked the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy.
The description of what was discovered and how it happened fits in a short post. It is simultaneously so amazing and so preposterous that some people who hear it will want to spend the rest of their lives understanding how it could be true and what we can learn from it:
076萌SNS is a social network, courtesy of 076. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All 076萌SNS content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.