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What did LIGO detect for the first time in 2015?
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gravity
A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) achieved the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
On September 14, 2015, the observatory recorded the signal produced by two black holes located approximately 1.3 billion light-years away. These black holes, which had masses 36 and 29 times that of the Sun, spiraled into each other and merged to form a new black hole with 62 times the mass of the Sun. During this cataclysmic event, three solar masses were converted into energy in the form of gravitational waves, confirming a fundamental prediction of general relativity.12