The first chirps of gravitational astronomy and more to come

Very good article, in New York Times, explaining the detection of gravitational waves, the history of the research and how it works.

From article is this intriguing phrase: The black holes that LIGO observed created a storm “in which the flow of time speeded, then slowed, then speeded,” he said. “A storm with space bending this way, then that.”

(My writing again) By the time the "waves" got to Earth and our detectors, the oscillations in the "speed of time" and the bending in the "fabric of space" was less then the width of a proton, but still evident in the super sensitive LIGO detectors. Concepts like time slowing down and speeding up are mind boggling.

Now we know gravitational waves do exist and we also know that we can detect them. The detector, that scientists have been perfecting for years, does work.

I remember talking about the far fetched dream of gravitational astronomy when I took astronomy classes way back in the 1970s. They said, "maybe someday we will be able to look at the universe via gravity waves."