LIGO announces first detection of gravitational waves

This morning the LIGO Scientific Collaboration announced that they have evidence for gravitational waves from a signal detected in September 2015. The signature matches theoretical expectations, based on General Relativity, for waves produced by the merger of two roughly 30 solar mass back holes. A paper has been published in Physical Review Letters, and is described here:

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/17

The theoretical prediction of the gravitational wave signature of black hole mergers was aided by the ground-breaking numerical work of a former UVic MSc student, Frans Pretorius, now a Professor at Princeton University.