Centuries ago, astronomers pointed their telescopes at the night sky as they tracked the trajectories of the planets and stars. Later technologies allowed for bigger observatories and in-space telescopes that looked outside the earth’s atmosphere and into different spectrums of light. Guided by Newton’s Laws, astronomers and physicists were able to verify that gravity acted on stellar bodies, as well as correctly describe many observed astronomical events.

Yet, there are still some phenomena that age-old astronomy cannot explain: light being distorted and bent by massive bodies, stars orbiting a single object-less point in space, rings of light amidst discrete points in deep-space photographs.

Later, Einstein’s theory of general relativity provided explanations where Newton fell mute, and a direct consequence of general relativity is the existence gravitational waves. Indeed, it was already clear with the advent of special relativity that some notion of gravitational radiation must exist. Special relativity taught us — among other things — that no information can propagate faster than the speed of light. To be consistent with this principle, changes in an object's gravitational field must be communicated as a kind of radiation. General relativity codified and made solid this intuitively clear notion.

Today, scientists hope to use gravitational waves to probe where light misleads or disappears entirely. Gravitational waves promise to open a new and unique window onto the “dark” processes of the universe.