Here is the announcement from today's Physical Review Letters by Abbott et al.:"On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal... This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger". I guess it took them a while to sort through the data.
No doubt this is exciting, but my question is how reliable/reproducible this result is (black hole merger sounds like a rare occurrence), and what consequences if any it has moving forward. In particular, can we hope to resolve something about general relativity, etc., by directly observing gravitational waves, or is it more like the Higgs boson detection, where only the negative result would have been game changing.
Sean Carroll has an enthusiastic blog post about it: Gravitational Waves at Last.
