Happy birthday, LIGO. Now die

LIGO gave the first direct proof that ripples in space-time actually existed

- ALEXA ROBLES-GIL

IT'S BEEN 10 years since astronomers first felt the universe tremble.

At 4 am on September 14, 2015, in both the desert of eastern Washington State and the backwoods of Louisiana, two beams of light began quivering in distant synchrony as the space through which they were traveling stretched and shrank at a rate of 250 times a second. These were the twin antennas of the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO.

Far out there in time and space a pair of black holes, gargantuan pits of eternally dark nothingness, had collided and merged, sending gravitational waves rippling through the universe and across the paths of the two antennas.