Text from Visions & Voices

(links from USC Libraries):

"Music and science coalesce in Einstein’s Cosmic Messengers, a stunning multimedia concert created by composer Andrea Centazzo and NASA [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] physicist Michele Vallisneri. Following this magnificent journey through the universe, science writer K.C. Cole will moderate a conversation with Centazzo, Vallisneri and USC cosmology professor Elena Pierpaoli.

Performed live by Centazzo, Einstein’s Cosmic Messengers tells the story of gravitational waves—the ripples in the fabric of space and time produced by violent events in the distant universe. Albert Einstein predicted their existence in 1916; but only in the last two decades have we achieved the technology to detect them, enabling LIGO, the U.S. Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and its siblings, to develop a global network of observatories. LIGO’s measurements will illuminate the fundamental nature of gravity and throw open an entirely new window onto the universe, offering views of previously inaccessible phenomena such as the coalescence of black holes and neutron stars. They will complement the great discoveries of ground- and space-based astronomy and the investigations of missions such as Planck, which observes the radiation originating from the Big Bang itself."

The news site Science Daily defines a gravitational wave as: "a fluctuation in the curvature of space-time which propagates as a wave, traveling outward from a moving object or system of objects."
The articles goes on to note: "Gravitational radiation is the energy transported by these waves.  Important examples of systems which emit gravitational waves are binary star systems, where the two stars in the binary are white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. Although gravitational radiation has not yet been directly detected, it has been indirectly shown to exist."

The Universe Today blog noted in 2008: "Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's 1916 General Theory of Relativity, but they are notoriously hard to detect and it's taken many decades to come close to observing them.