Maggie Chiang / Simons Foundation

On September 14, 2015, physicists attained the long-sought goal of detecting gravitational waves, the shockwaves spewed out by such cataclysmic events as the violent merger of two black holes.

This huge breakthrough quickly garnered three of the effort's key figures the physics Nobel Prize . In the ten years since then, scientists have detected hundreds of black holes coming together, as well as other extreme cosmic events like neutron stars colliding and black holes merging with a neutron star.

Now, in the journal Physical Review Letters , researchers say their ability to analyze gravitational waves has improved so much over the past decade that they were recently able to verify a key idea about the growth of black holes — one put

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