Big day in science.

Just after these two large and extraordinarily sensitive devices were set in operation last fall they observed the signal above—a gravitational wave. This discovery confirms Einstein's theory of relativity and confirms the existence of black holes. What I find fascinating is the amount of knowledge that can be deduced from these squiggles. According the the scientists involved, the signals illustrated above tell us that 1.2 billion years ago two black holes spun into each other and coalesced, sending out a big wave of gravity. This wave has been traveling toward Earth all that time and arrived just a few days after the detector had been turned on. Buried in this signal is even something called "ringdown" which is when two black holes shake off anything extraneous and settle into a globular shape.