More than 100 years ago, Albert Einstein predicted that large, compact, and fast-moving masses, such as those that occur in stellar explosions, cause dents in space-time that propagate like waves. These gravitational waves produce tiny length changes over millions of light-years as small as a fraction of an atomic nucleus. Their analysis illuminates, among other things, the physical processes of distant mergers of massive, compact objects that remain hidden from conventional astronomical measurement methods.
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