Physicists detected gravitational waves for the second time ever

It was one of the biggest moments in recent memory when an international team of physicists announced that they’d made the first direct observations of gravitational waves since Einstein first proposed them a century ago.

Now, just four months later, an Australian team has announced the second such achievement - they’ve directly detected gravitational waves caused by the collision of two black holes that are up to 14 times the size of our Sun.

The beauty of Eintein's general theory of relativity

One hundred years ago, an obscure German physicist named Albert Einstein presented to the Prussian Academy of Science his general theory of relativity. Nothing prior had prepared scientists for such a radical re-envisioning of the foundations of reality. Encoded in a set of neat compact equations was the idea that our universe is constructed from a sort of magical mesh, now known as 'spacetime'. According to the theory, the structure of this mesh would be revealed in the bending of light around distant stars.