Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
FIRST PRINTING OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DETECTION OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES AS PREDICTED BY EINSTEIN.
"Using the equations of general relativity, Einstein looked into the problem and found that gravitational waves should, indeed, exist, and he obtained a formula that described them. He published his results in June 1916, but he wasn't satisfied with his calculation, and after checking it through, he found he had made a mistake. He therefore published a second paper in 1918 correcting the mistake and extending the ideas of his previous paper. It would become a classic paper on gravitational waves.
"Several years later, in the mid-1930s, Einstein came back to the gravitational wave problem. He had used several approximations in his 1918 paper and wanted to derive a more accurate formula. By this time he was in the United States, so it seemed natural to him to submit his paper to Physical Review. To his surprise, however, he got it back stating that it was not acceptable in its present form. The paper had been sent out to an anonymous referee who had made a list of suggested changes that would make it acceptable. Einstein was outraged. He had never had a paper rejected before, even when he was unknown, and he was now a world-famous scientist. He refused to resubmit it." (Parker, Albert Einstein's Vision. Also: Steinicke, "Einstein and the Gravitational Waves").
Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but the detection of gravitational waves eluded us for nearly a century, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves on September 16, 2015.
The announcement of LIGO's seminal result was first made here in Physical Review Letters, after months confirming LIGO's observations.
ABBOTT, B.P. et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration), "Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger, Physical Review Letters 116, no. 6 (Feb 2016): 061102-1–16.
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