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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