An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Physicists have detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were set in motion by the collision of two black holes far across the universe more than a billion years ago. The event marks only the second time that scientists have spotted gravitational waves, the tenuous stretching and squeezing of spacetime predicted by Einstein more than a century ago. The faint signal received by the twin instruments of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US revealed two black holes circling one another 27 times before finally smashing together at half the speed of light. The cataclysmic event saw the black holes, one eight times more massive than the sun, the other 14 times more massive, merge into one about 21 times heavier than the sun. In the process, energy equivalent to the mass of the sun radiated into space as gravitational waves. Writing in the journal Physical Review Letters on Wednesday, the LIGO team describes how a second rush of gravitational waves showed up in their instrument a few months after the first, at 3.38am UK time on Boxing Day morning 2015. An automatic search detected the signals and emailed the LIGO scientists within minutes to alert them. The latest signals arrived at the Livingston detector 1.1milliseconds before they hit the Hanford detector, allowing scientists on the team to roughly work out the position of the collision in the sky. In February, LIGO scientists officially announced the first-ever observation of gravity waves.

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Source: Slashdot – Second Gravitational Wave Detected From Ancient Black Hole Collision