Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2016

4 GRAVITATI WAVES REVEALED by LIGO/Caltech/MIT/NSF COSMOLOGY MARCH-APRIL 2016 H ow our Sun and Earth warp space and time, or spacetime, is represented here with a green grid. As Albert Einstein demonstrated in his theory of general relativity, the gravity of massive bodies warps the fabric of space and time − and those bodies move along paths determined by this geometry. His theory also predicted the existence of gravitational waves, which are ripples in space and time. These waves, which move at the speed of light, are created when massive bodies accelerate through space and time. [LIGO/T. Pyle]