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Black hole duos wobble the fabric of spacetime

Animation showing Earth receiving light from pulsars, revealing signs of a gravitational wave background from black hole binaries.
Animation showing Earth receiving light from pulsars, revealing signs of a gravitational wave background from black hole binaries. Gif: OzGrav

Back in 2015, researchers spotted gravitational waves for the first time: the barely perceptible stretching and squeezing of spacetime caused by the interactions of black holes and other dense objects. But last year, several scientific consortia found signs that supermassive black hole binaries, in all likelihood, are responsible for the gravitational wave background: the constant sea of gravitational waves that are passing through you and me at this very moment.