It's been called possibly the most important physics discovery of the past half century, and RIT researchers were front and center in the discovery. Last February, scientists working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) directly detected gravitational waves from a cataclysmic event a billion light away, the collision of two black holes, which produced ripples in spacetime that traveled across the universe and ultimately reached earth last year. While the event was spectacular, releasing more energy for a millisecond than all the stars in the visible universe combined, the effects here on earth could only be felt using some of the most advanced detectors imaginable.