The science world has buzzed with rumors about this morning’s announcement by LIGO all week but now it’s for real. Scientists have detected gravitational waves. David Reitze, director of the LIGO project, compared our newly acquired ability to detect these elusive waves to Galileo’s first use of a telescope 400 years ago. Few doubt that this discovery will be worth a Nobel Prize. These mysterious ripples in spacetime were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity 100 years ago. They’ll let us explore the universe in a whole new way.

The announcement was scheduled at 10:30 ET (1530 UTC) for several places around the globe at once: at Hanford, Washington (site of one of the LIGO detectors) and the National Press Club at Washington D.C., as well as sites in Italy and Britain.
Watch the live simulcast of the National Press Club event here.