An international team of physicists has confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, which was first proposed by Albert Einstein about 100 years ago, marking one of the biggest astrophysical discoveries of the past century.

The news is causing waves in the scientific community. This is  because it not only improves human’s understanding of how the Universe works, it also opens up a whole new way of studying it.

It’s believed that the waves will help scientists to understand how the Universe is shaped by mass.

Although the gravitational wave signal was detected on September 14 last year, it was recently announced at a press conference. Experts are already saying the discovery is a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize.

Moreover scientists have been searching for 100 years for the waves, as they are the last major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity that’s yet to be confirmed.

The scientists used LIGO – the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory – to detect the waves.

The LIGO laboratory works by bouncing lasers back and forth in two 4-km-long pipes, allowing physicists to measure incredibly small changes in space-time.

On 14 September 2015, they picked up a relatively big change in their Livingston lab in Louisiana, what one would call a blip in the system.

Then, 7 milliseconds later, they detected the same blip with their lab in Hanford, Washington, 4,000 km away, suggesting that it had been caused by a gravitational wave passing through Earth.

In the months since, researchers have been rigorously studying this signal to see if it could have been caused by anything else.

The overwhelming conclusion is that the blip was caused by gravitational waves – the discovery has statistical significant of 5.1 sigma, which means there’s only a 1 in 6 million chance that the result is a fluke.

More so, the signal almost perfectly matches up with what scientists predicted gravitational waves would look like, based on Einstein’s theory.

The physicists were able to trace the signal back to the colliding of two black holes around 1.3 billion years ago. They said they had heard and recorded the sound of the event – a fleeting chirp, which confirmed the existence of gravitational waves.

This event was so massive that it significantly warped the fabric of space time, creating ripples that spread out across the Universe… finally reaching earth last year.

Members of the LIGO group, a worldwide team of scientists, along with scientists from a European team known as the Virgo Collaboration, published a report in Physical Review Letters on Thursday with more than 1,000 authors.

“I think this will be one of the major breakthroughs in physics for a long time,” said Szabolcs Marka, a Columbia University professor who is one of the LIGO scientists.

Several other gravitational wave observatories and detectors are scheduled to come online in the next five years, and they’ll allow us to more sensitively detect gravitational radiation.

A team of international scientists in a publication say they’ve discovered hundreds of hidden galaxies blocked from view until now by our own Milky Way galaxy.

By using a new telescope view, the scientists found the cluster of galaxies located some 250 million light years away from the Earth, one-third of which had never been observed before.

The team used Australia’s chief scientific body CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, frequently used in NASA’s Apollo missions.

They were able to see through the stars and dust of the Milky Way into Zone of Avoidance.  They found three new galaxy concentrations (NW1, NW2 and NW3) and two new clusters (CW1 and CW2).

Lead author Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, director of science with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) said 883 galaxies were discovered hidden behind the Milky Way galaxy.

“The Milky Way is very beautiful, of course, and it’s very interesting to study our own galaxy, but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,”

he said.

Furthermore, the new view of the region could also help explain something called the Great Attractor, a phenomenon which has been known the 1970s.

The Great Attractor is a mysterious spot in the universe whose strong gravity pulls on the Milky Way and thousands of other galaxies with the force equivalent to that of a million billion suns.

“We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,”

professor Staveley-Smith added.

The researchers also identified several new structures that could help to explain the movement of the Milky Way with the telescope.

An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass scientist didn’t know about until now.

The study was published in the Astronomical Journal, and involved researchers from Australia, South Africa, the US and the Netherlands.