Ever wonder why no one can legally own the Moon? Or why it's illegal to test nuclear weapons in space? It's all because of a series of space laws that began with the Outer Space Treaty back in 1967.

Since then, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has continued to lay down the law for humanity's final frontier, ensuring it remains a peaceful regime for intrepid explorers.

Here are the five primary agreements and some of the stipulations that go with them:

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On March 5, an asteroid about 100 feet across will fly close to Earth. But don't worry, experts at NASA's Center for Near Earth Objects Studies say there's no chance of the space rock impacting our planet.

In fact, a person's chance of dying from an asteroid impact are astronomical: 1 in 74,817,414, according to The Economist. The probability of dying from a dog bite or lightning strike is much higher.

Drawing from data collected by The Economist from America's National Safety Council and the National Academies, we made this graphic that puts a healthy perspective on the chances of dying from an asteroid compared to, say, walking. The numbers might surprise you:

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Get ready. Thursday, Feb. 11 could be a day for the history books. 

A team of scientists from Caltech, MIT, and the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration will convene in Washington, DC for an "update" on their efforts to detect a cosmic phenomenon called gravitational waves. 

This modest "update," however, could prove to be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the decade, opening the door to a new era of astronomy wherein scientists can actually watch two black holes devour each other or watch one chow down on a neutron star, the densest object in the cosmos aside from a black hole.

Like many other scientific breakthroughs of our time, this all began with a man named Albert Einstein. A hundred years ago, Einstein predicted that when mass in the universe accelerates, it generates invisible waves called gravitational waves. 

So, for example, when two black holes are about to merge, they spiral toward each other, accelerating in the process. This behavior generates gravitational waves that permeate the cosmos, stretching and contracting the fabric of spacetime — like ripples on a pond.

The only catch with Einstein's theory is that it hasn't been directly confirmed. That's because no one has ever detected a gravitational wave. But if expectations pan out, that could all change on Thursday at 10:30 AM ET, when the team makes their announcement. You can watch the event live on YouTube or via the stream we've provided below:

Scientists first began listening for gravitational waves with LIGO detectors in 2002, but after eight years of silence, they shut the machines down for a major update, which may prove to be exactly what was needed. 

Last September, the new and improved Advanced LIGO switched on, and now, five months later, we're getting ready for some exciting news. While a detection would signal the end of a century-long search, it would provide so much more for the field of astronomy.

"A discovery is really not an end. A discovery would be the most glorious beginning of something new," Columbia University physics professor and member of the LIGO collaboration Szabolcs Marka told Business Insider.

Marka added that gravitational waves will be a revolutionary tool in the study of enigmatic sources like black holes, neutron stars, and supernova explosions.

To date, astronomers can only observe the environment around black holes and not the objects themselves, but gravitational waves could change that:

"We have indirect observation of black holes, we have indirect observation of objects around black holes and their behavior indicate that there should be a black hole," Marka said. "Advanced LIGO gives us a chance — through an eventual discovery, we will be able to observe black holes directly."

And black holes are just the beginning. If Advanced LIGO becomes the gravitational wave detecting machine that scientists hope for, it could prove monumental in studying the way matter behaves at the heart of a neutron star, what triggers a supernova explosion, and what causes gamma ray bursts — the brightest events in the universe.

There is an opportunity here to open up a whole new universe of human understanding, Marka said. 

READ MORE: This chart shows how you'll probably die

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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight

When Albert Einstein predicted that two colliding black holes could cause gravitational waves in the fabric of space, he was sure to mention he never thought we'd confirm the elusive waves exist. But he was wrong: we did, in 1974, and now scientists are using a giant laser-based experiment called LIGO to try and observe gravitational waves.

Produced by Rob Ludacer. Original Reporting by Dave Mosher

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Scientists have announced on February 11 that we have finally recorded an elusive phenomenon Albert Einstein first predicted 100 years ago.

Called gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space are caused by colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, exploding stars, and other cataclysmic events.

Two astronomers discovered the first evidence of gravitational waves back in 1974.

But scientists ever since then have struggled to directly sample their telltale warping of space. Einstein deemed the problem so hard that he did not believe we'd ever find them.

"It would revolutionize physics to detect them,"Szabi Marka, a physicist at Columbia University, told Tech Insider. "Some say it's the last undiscovered territory of Einstein."

Aside from proving fundamental physics, direct detection of gravitational waves has opened up a new era of astronomy. Researchers could detect exploding stars before any of their light reaches Earth, probe the secrets of black holes, and understand what happens when — and how often — dead stars violently collide.

"We could learn about something that was impossible to touch before," Marka said.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), is a $1 billion experiment that has searched for signs of the phenomenon since 2002. The announcement today confirmed that LIGO has detected gravitational waves coming from two black holes colliding deep in space 1.3 billion years ago.

See our full coverage of the gravitational wave discovery.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) live feed with scientists from LIGO is ongoing. Watch here: 

Note that the NSF and LIGO webcast is probably going to be a bit technical, but Tech Insider will have a lot of nerds watching to bring you the latest news in comprehensible form.

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NOW WATCH: Einstein's wildest prediction from 100 years ago is turning out to be true

For more than 100 years scientists have been searching for signs of gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted back in 1916.

Nearly six decades passed since astronomers first confirmed their existence, but detecting the waves themselves has proved to be very difficult. (Even Einstein didn't believe it could be done.)

But now there are rumblings that researchers have finally observed gravitational waves in action and will announce as much on Feb. 11.

Until then, you can play along with the search — and see how hard it is — using an online game called Black Hole Hunter by Cardiff University.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an enormous experiment that's spearheaded by MIT and Caltech.

It uses two giant L-shaped detectors in the US to hunt for the elusive waves, which are emitted by giant exploding stars, colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and other cataclysmic events in space.

LIGO captures the signal of the waves as vibrations, which can be transmuted into sound.

Black Hole Hunter lets you listen to this sound in its purest form — but then asks you to find it in one of four very static-filled sound files:

The static is there for a good reason.

When scientists try to pick up the ripples of spacetime through LIGO, the signal can get cluttered with the vibrations of basically everything else: earthquakes, traffic, or even a lab tech sneezing.

The sound Black Hole Hunter plays sounds like a huge, reverberating zipper. In each level, the pitch changes and gets quieter in relation to the static.

Like any good video game, you get three lives before your number's up.

I tried my hand at it, and until level 6, it wasn't actually that difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Level 7, however, was pretty maddening.

The key is to listen very, very closely for the fuzzy rising tone at the end of the wave signal.

And don't be fooled by the shape of the samples: They won't necessarily widen toward the end, like the representation of the pure signal (in white).

As you progress, the game drops fun facts to keep you going. For example: Did you know that gravitational waves observations could help tell astronomers if a dying star will ultimately end up as black holes or some other compact object?

The game's goal isn't to stump nerdy journalists, but get people interested in one of the greatest physics problems of our time. The interactive, first launched in 2008, links to LIGO's public Einstein@Home project, which at one point used volunteers' computers to crunch data in the search for gravitational waves.

So how does LIGO actually work?

It is (relatively) simple: When a big, dense object in space does something sudden, gravitational waves fan out in all directions and eventually make their way to the Earth, slightly squeezing and stretching space along the way.

To see those tiny disturbances — akin to noticing a pencil eraser has been added to the end of the Milky Way — LIGO shoots a laser through a beam splitter, sending two beams of light along two perpendicular arms, each 2.5 miles long.

The light passes through a first mirror near the base of arm, then to a mirror at the end. From there the beam bounces back and forth between the two mirrors, increasing the total distance it travels.

When gravitational waves pass by, the length of each arm stretches and shortens rhythmically with the wave's pulse — and so does the lengthened beam.

When the waves of light return to the detector at the base of both arms, they're slightly offset from each other. Instead of a steady beam, the detector picks up the beam's wiggling.

If both LIGO detectors see their laser light flicker around the same time, it has indeed detected the waves — and the event will radically alter our understanding of the universe.

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NOW WATCH: Einstein's wildest prediction from 100 years ago is turning out to be true

A "revolutionary" new era in science has just begun with a violent event deep in space.

Today researchers announced that they have detected ripples in the fabric of space called gravitational waves. It's a groundbreaking discovery that has eluded Earth's brightest minds and most sensitive machines for decades.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but he thought them far too feeble to detect as they undulated across the universe.

Einstein was wrong.

The news was announced February 11 by members of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a 15-nation, 900-scientist, $1 billion experiment that has searched for signs of the phenomenon since 2002.

"Finally these waves have been detected on Earth with an unbelievably sensitive experiment. And, surprisingly, the source of the waves is a system of two black holes in orbit around each other, that spiral inward and smash together," Cornell physics and astrophysics professor Saul Teukolsky confirmed in a statement emailed to Tech Insider.

The waves the researchers detected were created by two black holes colliding and merging to form a single black hole 1.3 billion years ago. When the two black holes merged, they released the energy of three suns.

Physicist Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator based at Columbia University, told Tech Insider before the announcement that detecting the waves "would revolutionize physics" and chart out "the last undiscovered territory of Einstein."

And a collision of two black holes is a cataclysmic event we could only dream of observing until now.

"Having gravitational waves as a tool will enable us to study black holes, and black holes hold the key to so many future puzzles in science," Marka said. "We don't actually know what happens around a black hole. We don't know what happens when a black hole meets another black hole. We don't know what happens when a black hole eats something."

There are many other uses of gravitational waves now all squarely within the realm of possibility, and Marka says the coming era of research that's barreling toward us is going to be "spectacular."

"We'll open new doors which can never be closed again," he said.

The discovery not only vindicates Einstein's wildest prediction and gives astronomers a powerful new tool to probe the cosmos — from deep inside exploding stars to the surfaces of black holes — but also backs up a $1 billion idea and tells us we're on the right track to understanding how the universe works.

How we first learned gravitational waves exist

Space is pervaded by, well, space. It's an invisible fabric that can stretch and shrink and warp and curve in multiple dimensions, even time — hence the official name spacetime.

Anything with mass warps the fabric, including you. Yet the denser and more massive an object, the greater the distortion.

Dense objects that move really, really fast can radically distort spacetime, some with enough energy to trigger ripples like a speedboat accelerating across a placid lake.

This description of gravitational waves was pure conjecture, though, until 1974. That's when astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor stumbled upon the deep-space equivalent of two speedboats spiraling into each other.

Both objects were neutron stars — ultra-dense dead stars that formed during a supernova. (The star collapses but is not big enough to form a black hole). One of the neutron stars was spinning fast enough to emit radio pulses as a pulsar, which is how they found the star system to begin with.

Hulse and Taylor soon discovered the neutron stars were rapidly orbiting one another.

Surprisingly, over the years they noticed the pulsar's orbit was hastening, bit by bit, and deduced the stars would spiral into each other and collide in about 300 million years.

"That orbital energy had to be going somewhere," physicist Imre Bartos, also at Columbia University and LIGO, told Tech Insider. By disturbing spacetime so much during their deadly cosmic dance, he said, the stars had to bleed off the energy as gravitational waves.

Hulse and Taylor proved this by showing the energy loss matched up perfectly with Einstein's predictions.

The astronomers won a 1993 Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking discovery of the bizarre object, now called the Hulse-Taylor Pulsar, and its role in indirectly showing gravitational waves exist.

Still, they did not actually detect the waves themselves.

How we detected gravitational waves — and why it took so long

LIGO is an experiment that uses two L-shaped gravitational wave detectors: One is in Lousiana, and another is located thousands of miles away in Washington state.

These massive detectors use a clever trick to pick up on these ripples that would be otherwise impossible to notice.

Each arm of the L extends for 2.5 miles. A laser beam is split at the bend in the L and travels down each arm to bounce off several mirrors. The mirrors lengthen and then recombine the laser at a detector. Without a gravitational wave, the laser beams cancel each other out perfectly, so no light is picked up by the detector.

But when a gravitational wave hits the detector, sort of like a pool of oil on the surface of a rippling lake, one arm will shrink and the other will stretch. Then, as the wave finishes passing by, the arms will bounce back to normal. This shape-shifting is absolutely imperceptible to the human eye, but it means the laser beams will no longer line up perfectly, and the detector will pick up a flash of light: the long-sought sign of a gravitational wave. And if the very same disturbance is recorded at both detectors, thousands of miles away, researchers can deduce that it came from space.

Makra compared the detectors to a pair of giant ears that can "hear" the spacetime ripples that result from neutron star collisions, black hole mergers, or other catastrophic events in space, like a giant exploding star.

The closer a collision is to Earth, the "louder" the signal should be.

LIGO's hearing — when the laser beam is disturbed — is sensitive enough to detect mind-blowingly small disturbances of space, "much smaller than the size of the atoms the detector is built of," he said.

PhD Comics says LIGO's level of sensitivity is "like being able to tell that a stick 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meters long has shrunk by 5mm."

Put another way, detecting a gravitational wave is like noticing the Milky Way — which is about 100,000 light-years wide — has stretched or shrunk by the width of a pencil eraser.

"Gravity is a horribly weak force, which makes our lives much harder," Bartos said. "But one thing that works to our advantage is that the signal decays much [more slowly] than light. Gravitational waves fade as you go farther but not as quickly."

So it's no wonder why it has taken researchers so long to find gravitational waves: it's terribly tricky work. Even car traffic on a road miles away can disturb LIGO, despite the instruments' state-of-the-art vibration-dampening equipment.

But today's announcement proves the concept really works.

Why the future of astronomy looks amazing

Bartos and Marka said detecting gravitational waves provides a powerful new tool to study the universe.

One killer application of gravitational waves is to reveal supernovas — huge, exploding stars that seed the universe with elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen as well as platinum and gold — hours before they're visible to any telescope.

"Gravitational waves arrive at Earth long before any light does," Bartos said. "When a massive star's core collapses, starting the supernova to form a black hole, the surface doesn't know the core has collapsed for a while."

The reason, he said, is that the star gets in the way of itself. "All of this stuff tries to come out, including light, but it bumps into the star's matter and gets stuck until the whole star collapses. But gravitational waves can pass right through."

So if a gravitational wave's source lights up some detectors, it might be from a supernova — giving astronomers plenty of notice to point telescopes like Hubble in that direction, hit record, and get an unprecedented look at processes that are the reason Earth and life exist at all.

Bartos says the other advantage is that gravitational waves can reveal what's going on inside a dying star.

"It's not just about catching a supernova. You can only scratch the surface of them with telescopes," he said. "In order to have a better picture of the process, you need to see it at the heart, where a black hole is being born."

"Right now the only tools to explore what happens inside are computer models," he added.

Yet another way gravitational waves will help astronomers understand the universe is in measuring the frequency of major cosmic phenomena.

Supernovas in the Milky Way, which LIGO might detect, are thought to occur two or three times every 100 years. And until now, we had no idea how frequently events like black hole or neutron star mergers might occur and trigger detectable events. It seems they are rare, but not too rare for us to detect.

And those events are critically important to understand, since they shape star systems and galaxies.

What's in store for gravitational wave research

"LIGO will be three times more sensitive in three years, and we roughly expect to see 10s of events per year," Bartos said.

That sensitivity could get even higher soon. LIGO wants to build a third instrument, but in the meantime it will get help from Europe's new VIRGO detector (opening in late 2016) and Japan's KAGRA facility (going online in 2017).

"The more [detectors] you have, the better your sensitivity, and the more stuff you will see," Bartos said. "It becomes easier to weed out the things that happen here on Earth, like traffic and earthquakes" and find and pinpoint a signal.

The future for gravitational-wave astronomy is looking very bright, and the top researchers behind LIGO — possibly Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech, and Rainer Weiss of MIT — are almost certainly going to get a call from Stockholm sometime soon.

"[Y]ou have 90% odds that it will win the Nobel Prize in Physics this year," Cliff Burgess, a physicist at McMaster University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, told Science Magazine. "It's off-the-scale huge."

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NOW WATCH: Einstein's wildest prediction from 100 years ago is turning out to be true

A team of scientists just announced an Earth-shattering discovery that encompasses everything from Albert Einstein's famous theories about the laws of physics to the fundamental way we approach our study of the universe.

It all began with a surprising finding about black holes. By their very nature, black holes are a mysterious breed of cosmic beast whose gravitational pull on their surrounding environment is so great that nothing escapes — not even light.

This makes them impossible to see, difficult to detect, and ridiculously tough to study. As a result, black holes continue to boggle the minds of the most brilliant astrophysicists.

But now, thanks to a $620 million machine and a dedicated team of scientists willing to seek out and discover the unthinkable, astrophysicists have a new way to spy on these elusive creatures.

• The machine is called Advanced LIGO, short for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
• The scientists comprise the LIGO Scientific Collaboration— a group of over 1,000 scientists worldwide.
• And the new tool — the one that astronomers will be using decades from now to unlock secrets of our universe — is a phenomenon called gravitational waves.

On Thursday, at a press conference in Washington, DC, the LIGO Collaboration released to the public results that have been secretly circulating along the wires of the scientific community for the last few weeks.

Briefly described in an email by McMaster University physicist Clifford Burgess and leaked to Twitter earlier this month — and now detailed in a paper published in Physical Review Letters— is evidence of two gigantic black holes spiraling toward each other, eventually merging into a single, more monstrous black hole.

So, why does this matter, and what do gravitational waves have to do with it?

First, it's the most compelling evidence we now have that black holes truly exist.

Gravitational waves are the sole means scientists currently have to observe a black hole merger. Which is why this latest discovery, which is the first of its kind, ranks alongside some of the top discoveries of all time.

"If this is true," Burgess told Science Magazine about the discovery before Thursday's announcement, "then you have 90% odds that it will win the Nobel Prize in Physics this year. It's off-the-scale huge."

Simple math for a complex problem

From the signal that the scientists detected, they were able to deduce that what they were seeing was a cosmic collision of epic proportions.

That collision involved two black holes, one 36 times more massive than our sun and the other 29 times more massive, spiraling toward one another in a rapid, cosmic dance, located 1.3 billion light years away.

In line with Einstein's prediction, as the two closed in, they emitted increasingly more frequent gravitational waves.

This translates into a higher pitch in the LIGO signal with the climax happening exactly at the time the two black holes merge. The result is a high pitched "whoop!", which experts call a "chirp" and sounds like this:

The pitch of the "whoop" gives scientists an idea of what they're seeing, explained Columbia University physics professor and member of the LIGO collaboration Szabolcs Marka.

"We can categorize them well enough so when we see a signal we can fingerprint it," Marka told Business Insider. "We can say that this must have been a supernova [or] this must have been two black holes ... because they kind of sound different."

By studying the final "whoop", the scientists calculated the mass of the final black hole, and what they discovered was a black hole 62 times more massive than our sun. But take note that our initial masses — 36 and 29 — do not sum up to 62. There's a discrepancy of three solar masses missing.

The team reported that this extra mass was radiated away in the form of energy-carrying gravitational waves.

Now, that is a whopping, enormous amount of energy. To compare, theoretical physicist Luboš Motl calculated that the Sun and Earth emit enough energy in the form of gravitational waves (yes, our planet emits these waves too) to charge two Edison light bulbs. These two black holes emitted 10⁴⁴ times more energy than that.

This is the first time in history that humans have ever seen two black holes merge. Before now, astronomers couldn't be sure if such an epic collision ever occurred because they had no way of detecting it.

Detecting the unthinkably tiny

In 1916, Albert Einstein first predicted that when two bodies accelerate through space around each other, they produce ripples of energy in the form of what experts call gravitational waves. These waves then propagate away from the source at the speed of light and, eventually, reach Earth.

As these waves travel, they contract and expand the fabric of spacetime — like ripples across a pond. But these distortions are extremely small — as much as one million times smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom.

These gravitational waves would be so minuscule, Einstein thought, that humans could never actually detect them.

His skepticism held true for a century.

Flashing lights

But Advanced LIGO is an ingenious tool in the hunt for gravitational waves.

Here's how it works:

• It uses a highly sophisticated laser system (shown to the right) that's sensitive to distortions about 10^-18 meters — small enough to catch a gravitational wave.
• It consists of two detectors — one in Livingston, Louisiana and the other in Hanford, Washington. This way, the signal seen from one detector can be confirmed or denied fairly quickly by the second detector. And as the scientists reported on Thursday, they saw the same signal at both detectors.
• At each detector, engineers fire a powerful laser into something called a beam splitter, which separates the laser into two beams. The resulting beams travel back and fourth across two tunnels, each 2.5 miles long, with a mirror at the end. The beams reflect off the mirror and eventually converge back at the center. When they do that, the beams recombine and, essentially, disappear. But this disappearing act can only occur if the two beams take the same amount of time to return from their journey down the two tunnels.

Here's the key part: If a gravitational wave were to get in the way of one of the beams, they'd create a flash of light upon recombination because one beam takes longer to return than the other, messing up the disappearing process.

That flash of light is what the LIGO collaboration has been after for the last 14 years.

Scientists will continue to ramp up the sensitivity on Advanced LIGO over the next five years. By 2020, scientists suspect it will be 1,000 times more sensitive, which will only improve their chances of catching more gravitational waves in the near future.

Also joining in this hunt, eventually, are the advanced VIRGO Interferometers located at the European Gravitational Observatory in Italy and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector at the Kamioka Mine in Japan, set to begin operations in 2018.

"It is good to be a scientist," Marka said.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered 883 galaxies that have been hiding in plain sight

NSF just announced they had observed gravitational waves using LIGO. For the unfamiliar, here's what gravitational waves are, what causes them, and what it means for our study of the universe. 

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A group of scientists just proved Einstein's gravitational wave theory. Here's what happened.

Produced by Matthew Stuart. Video Courtesy of National Science Foundation.  

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Einstein was right. Ripples through the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves do exist.

Physicists just confirmed the first detection in a signal that came from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that happened 1.3 billion years ago. Those ripples have just finally made their way to Earth.

The team of scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) created a simulation from the data they collected to show what the powerful event might have looked like.

First, two black holes spiraled in towards each other, collided, and merged:

As a bonus, this is also the first time we've ever observed two black holes merging, Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO, said during a press conference on February 11.

The collision and merger between the two incredibly dense objects created a "violent storm in the fabric of spacetime," Reitze said. Ripples of gravitational waves spilled out:

The waves traveled all the way to Earth and even though they give off an incredibly weak signal, the LIGO detectors were sensitive enough to pick it up.

"The Earth is jiggling like jello," Reitze said during the press conference as he explained the simulation. In reality that jiggling is barely perceptible.

This discovery will open up an entirely new field of gravitational waves research and it has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of black holes.

"Now that we have the ability to detect these systems, now that we know that binary black holes are there, we'll begin listening to the universe," Reitze said.

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NOW WATCH: You've been popping your ears all wrong

For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed gravitational waves, ripples in space time caused by violent cosmic events, like the explosion of a star or the collision of black holes. Researchers atLaser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced their discovery on February 11, and the results could be the biggest physics news of the century.

But while gravitational waves are getting most of the attention, they are not the only big discovery of the day.

This is also the first time scientists have been able to confirm the existence of binary black holes, two black holes held in orbit with each other. The event that created the gravitational waves we're seeing today are the result of a cataclysmic collision 1.3 billion years ago.

Two black holes were caught in a death spiral, their orbits shrinking as they pulled each other closer. This dance created such tremendous gravitational force that the stars surrounding the black holes appeared to distort, as the light emitted from the collision was bent. The black holes then merged into one, as seen in the GIF below (a visualization):

"What’s really amazing about this is, this is the first time that this kind of a system has ever been seen, a binary black hole merger," said David Reitze, LIGO Laboratory Executive Director, at a press conference announcing the discovery. "It’s proof that binary black holes exist in the universe."

Black holes hold a lot of potential answers, but we still don't know much about them. These new discoveries will help.

"Having gravitational waves as a tool will enable us to study black holes, and black holes hold the key to so many future puzzles in science," Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator at Columbia University, told Tech Insider. "We don't actually know what happens around a black hole. We don't know what happens when a black hole meets another black hole. We don't know what happens when a black hole eats something."

Watch David Reitze of LIGO explain what they found below:

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NOW WATCH: Here’s what the first gravitational waves ever detected sound like

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is made up of two complexes in the United States. Separated by thousands of miles, each one is 5 miles long.

Produced by Matt Stuart. Video courtesy National Science Foundation.

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On Thursday, a team of scientists announced that they had detected a phenomenon called gravitational waves for the first time.

Rumors are circulating that the discovery is worthy of the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics because it gives humans a new way to study our universe.

These waves are ripples that contract and expand the space-time around them. Scientists detected them by measuring this distortion as one of these waves passed through Earth using the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

But doing so was extremely difficult, and what scientists discovered upon detecting these waves was nothing short of extraordinary. Check out some mind-boggling facts about them and this latest discovery:

SEE ALSO: The first discovery of 2 colliding black holes just fundamentally changed our perception of the universe

DON'T MISS: One of Einstein's last theories was just confirmed, but you would be shocked at how underestimated he was during his lifetime

Gravitational waves were first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago. It's taken that long for our technology to catch up to his brilliance and confirm his theory.

Scientists suspect that two merging black holes emit more energy in the form of gravitational waves in the last few minutes before they collide than a single star emits over billions of years.

Gravitational waves contract and expand the fabric of space-time, but by only a small amount. The LIGO instruments (one shown below) are designed to detect a distortion that is 1 million times smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom.

Today, scientists announced the first-ever gravitational wave detection, and the news is still reverberating around the world.

A 900-person team and the hyper-sensitive Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was behind the discovery of the waves, first theorized by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago.

But brilliant minds and incredible technology weren't the only things in play.

Two huge black holes circled each other, smacked together, and lost three sun's worth of mass. All of that matter converted into pure energy in a fraction of a second, jolting the fabric of space and sending out huge ripples.

It's likely the most powerful event ever recorded in human history.

"Colliding black holes created a violent storm in the fabric of the universe,"Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist from CalTech and LIGO pioneer, said at today's press conference.

The effects of the merger dramatically warped space and time, sending waves across the known universe:

Thorne likened past observations to watching the ocean on a calm day — the dynamics of the water aren't apparent from the shore.

But a huge storm creating wave action allows an observer to see how the system moves.

"The storm was brief — 20 milliseconds — very brief, but very powerful," Thorne said. "The total power output during the collision was 50 times greater than all the power of all the stars in the universe put together."

This huge power surge then spread out and traveled more than 1.3 billion light-years to Earth.

Fortunately, it arrived right when LIGO was finally advanced enough to register the event's much-weaker influence.

The signal was recorded at both LIGO facilities in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington state, just 7 milliseconds apart from each other.

According to Quanta Magazine, the signal was so strong the researchers thought it was an error:

And if all this wasn't exciting enough, it's the first time astronomers have ever observed a binary black hole system. LIGO scientists said that the incredible discovery will open up a whole new field of astronomical research.

They're just getting started. Five more LIGO-like research facilities are either under construction or planned across the world.

LIGO is currently at only a fraction at its potential sensitivity, and the new gravitational-wave observatories will allow scientists to better triangulate the location of future events in the sky.

Thorne and his colleagues expect that they'll be picking up gravitational wave signals more frequently and from a greater distance in the near future.

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NOW WATCH: These 5-mile long buildings led to one of the greatest discoveries in physics

Astronomy as we know it will never be same.

Today, February 11, scientists announced that we finally detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as "gravitational waves."

The signal was detected at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)— a lab that's been hunting these waves for years.

The detection provides convincing evidence that black holes are real, confirms a long-mysterious part of Einstein's theory of relativity, and has the potential to change our understanding of the universe and its beginnings. We now have the power to learn about events that happened billions of years ago, events that were previously invisible to us on Earth.

Here's a quick overview of what gravitational waves are, and why the discovery is one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs we've seen in the last century.

What are gravitational waves?

We know from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915, that really massive objects can curve the fabric of spacetime around them.

In some ways, it's similar to a bowling ball sinking into and deforming a taut sheet.

So we know spacetime can be warped, and this has some crazy implications.

When a massive object suddenly accelerates, for example, it creates ripples through spacetime, called gravitational waves, that are similar to the ripples raindrops create on the surface of a lake.

Physicists have long thought we should be able to spot these ripples when a star explodes, or when two massive objects collide.

It turns out they were right. LIGO detected gravitational waves coming from the collision and merging of two black holes.

Why is it such a big deal that we found gravitational waves?

For one, this discovery is more confirmation that Einstein's theory of relativity is correct.

But it also means that an entirely new era of astronomy is upon us.

Astronomers finally have a way to track all the objects in the universe that don't emit any kind of visible light, like black holes and neutron stars — and perhaps objects that physicists haven't yet dreamed up or discovered yet. We finally have a concrete way to study these mysterious cosmic objects that we know very little about.

The detection of gravitational waves also gives us more evidence that black holes — the details of which have long puzzled astronomers — are real. Dennis Overbye, writing in The New York Times, called the finding "a ringing ... confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape."

"Before, you could argue in principle whether or not black holes exist," Bruce Allen, a LIGO member in Hanover, Germany told Science Magazine. "Now you can’t."

Bottom line: gravitational waves are going to paint a completely new picture of the universe.

And if we find gravitational waves at the edge of the observable universe, it would lend a lot of support to the theory of inflation, a cornerstone of the Big Bang. It would also give us a better picture of how the universe came to be: We'd be able to see the birth of our universe. 

Gravitational waves might also bridge quantum physics (the physics of the very small) with classical physics (the physics of the very large) and get us closer to one unified "theory of everything." Right now those two branches of science don't get along; physicists can't figure out how the two ideas are supposed to fit together. But if gravitational waves (classical physics) are linked to inflation (quantum physics), we'll know that the two theories can and do work together.

The revelation could usher in a whole new era of physics, astronomical observatories, and perhaps even lead to some as-yet-unknown practical applications, too.

How did we detect them?

Over the years physicists have used increasingly complex instruments in hopes of finding gravitational waves.

LIGO — a huge, L-shaped, laser-powered detector — has been looking for gravitational waves since it opened in 2002:

A more powerful, advanced LIGO went online in September 2015, and when these gravitational ripples passed by Earth, it picked up the disturbances thanks to its new, highly-sensitive laser and mirror setup. 

Where were we searching for gravitational waves?

Scientists at LIGO were searching around exploding stars, merging black holes, and neutron stars to detect signs of gravitational waves.

In this case, they detected the waves coming from two merging black holes.

Other physicists, like those with the BICEP2 experiment, are searching for signs of gravitational waves from the Big Bang at the edge of the observable universe.

According to the theory of inflation, the universe expanded during the Big Bang around 100 trillion trillion times in a fraction of a second in its first moments of existence. That kind of cataclysmic disturbance should have created gravitational waves through spacetime.

When the universe began to cool after its rapid inflation, it left behind a faint pattern of temperature fluctuations on the edge of the observable universe. We call it the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Some physicists think we should be able to spot gravitational waves hiding in the CMB.

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NOW WATCH: Here's what gravitational waves are and why they matter

For the first time ever, scientists have detected ripples through the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected these gravitational waves coming from the collision and merging of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. And it turns out that when those waves reach us, they sound like a high-pitch chirp.

Gravitational waves are incredibly faint and difficult to detect. They move the Earth by less than the width of an atom’s nucleus. But you can "hear" them if you have the right equipment and data.

"We can hear these gravitational waves, we can hear the universe," LIGO spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez said during a press conference on February 11.

Here's what the waves sound like:

We can hear them because LIGO's two detector systems of lasers and mirrors actually act more like a pair of ears than a pair of eyes.

Here's LIGO's explanation for why we can hear the gravitational waves coming from a pair of merging black holes:

As the two [black holes] rotate around each other, their orbital distances decrease and their speeds increase, much like a spinning figure skater who draws his or her arms in close to their body. This causes the frequency of the gravitational waves to increase until the moment of coalescence. The sound these gravitational waves would produce is a chirp sound (much like when increasing the pitch rapidly on a slide whistle) since the binary system’s orbital frequency is increasing (any increase in frequency corresponds to an increase in pitch).

Another way to think about it is to consider speech patterns. In the same way that tone of voice and pitch can help you make sense of what's happening in a room full of people talking, changes in the amplitude and frequency of the gravitational waves can tell scientists the kind of sound it's making.

"I like to think of it in a linguistic way," MIT physicist Scott Hughes told The Atlantic. "The vocabulary of the [black hole merger] is imprinted on the wave."

We're excited to hear more chirps, but for now we've got our new text message tone picked out.

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NOW WATCH: Here’s what the first gravitational waves ever detected sound like

Ripples in the fabric of space, called gravitational waves, are careening across the universe, right through everything and everyone.

Scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment have detected some of the waves— a feat Einstein thought impossible 100 years ago — emanating from two colliding black holes.

"The skies will never be the same," physicist Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator based at Columbia University, said via a webcam in Washington DC to a crowded lecture hall in New York. "[Gravitational waves] will let us listen to the music of the cosmos."

Tech Insider spoke with Marka, Imre Bartos, also a physicist at Columbia and LIGO, and other researchers about the "revolutionary" new era of astronomy they say has begun.

Here are just a handful of formerly impossible things astronomers can now do with gravitational waves.

One killer application is to reveal supernovas — huge, exploding stars that seed the universe with elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen — hours before they're visible to telescopes.

"Gravitational waves arrive at Earth long before any light does," Bartos said. The reason is that the star gets in the way of itself.

"All of this stuff tries to come out, including light, but it bumps into the star's matter and gets stuck until the whole star collapses. But gravitational waves can pass right through."

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European scientists have given up hope of restoring contact with space probe Philae, which successfully landed on a comet in a pinpoint operation only to lose power because its solar-driven batteries were in the shade.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) said on Friday it suspects Philae is now covered in dust and too cold to operate.

"Unfortunately, the probability of Philae re-establishing contact with our team at the DLR Lander Control Center is almost zero, and we will no longer be sending any commands," Stephan Ulamec, Philae Project Manager of the DLR, said in a statement.

Philae came to rest on a comet in November 2014 in what was considered a remarkable feat of precision space travel. But it closed down soon after because it was in the shade and could not be recharged.

The probe woke up in June as the comet approached the sun, giving scientists hope that the lander could complete some experiments that it had not done before its solar-powered batteries ran out.

But the lander has not made contact with its Rosetta orbiter since July 9, and a last-ditch attempt to re-establish contact with the robotic lab has failed.

"It would be very surprising if we received a signal now," Ulamec said.

While the project team believes that Philae is likely ice-free, the solar panels that recharge its batteries are probably covered with dust.

In addition, night-time temperatures can now fall below 180 degrees Celsius below zero (-292°F) as comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves away from the sun, which is much colder than Philae was designed to withstand.

While Philae did not have as much time as initially hoped after landing for experiments, information it has collected is reshaping thinking about comets, and it has been a useful lesson for designing future missions.

Scientists expect to get a final glimpse of the lander in the European summer, when the Rosetta spacecraft snaps some pictures during close fly-bys, before landing on the comet itself when its mission ends in September.

And in around six years, Philae and Rosetta will near the Earth again when the comet returns to circle the sun again.

Rosetta is a mission of the European Space Agency, with contributions from its member states and U.S. space agency NASA. The Philae lander was provided by a consortium headed by the DLR.

(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

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Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why finding alien life would change everything we know about our own world.

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StarTalk Radio is a podcast and radio program hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, where comic co-hosts, guest celebrities, and scientists discuss astronomy, physics, and everything else about life in the universe. Follow StarTalk Radio on Twitter, and watch StarTalk Radio "Behind the Scenes" on YouTube.

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