L ast month, work began on the world’s first space-based gravitational wave detector. The European Space Agency and partner aerospace companies are developing orbiting, detector spacecraft to observe gravitational waves from some of the universe’s most massive objects.

The LIGO Hanford Observatory near the Tri-Cities and its twin in Louisiana detected ripples of time and space passing through Earth from the most massive collision of black holes ever observed, a coalition of the world’s four gravitational wave observatories announced Tuesday.

Scientists are using pulsars to detect the gravitational wave 'hum' created from supermassive black hole mergers. Credit: National Science Foundation (NSF)