Scientists Just Got an Unprecedented Glimpse into the Nature of Reality

Scientists have captured the clearest ever gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—a breakthrough that has resolved decades-old mysteries about black holes and the nature of our reality, according to a study published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves forged by an ancient merger between two massive black holes reached Earth on January 14 of this year, where they were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana. LIGO has discovered hundreds of these waves, but the January event, known as GW250114, is the cleanest detection ever made with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80 (meaning that the signal is about 80 times louder than the noise).