What have scientists actually discovered? Scientists have observed faint ripples caused by the movement of black holes that gently stretch and compress everything in the universe.

They reported that they were able to "hear" so-called LOW FREQUENCY gravitational waves, which are the changes in the fabric of the universe created by huge objects moving and colliding in space.

In the most recent research, scientists were looking for waves at much lower frequencies. These slow ripples can take years or even decades to rise and fall, and they likely come from some of the largest objects in our universe: supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our sun.

Galaxies across the universe are constantly colliding and merging. When this occurs, astronomer Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, explained that scientists think the massive black holes at the centers of these galaxies also come together and engage in a dance before collapsing into one another. other.

Black holes emit gravitational waves as they circulate in these pairs, known as binaries.

"Binaries of supermassive black holes, slowly and quietly orbiting each other, are the tenors and bass of the cosmic opera," said Marka.

No instrument on Earth could capture the ripples of these giants. So "we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy," said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lam of the SETI Institute.