Physicists want to 'listen' for these 7 bizarre phenomena in space using gravitational waves

For the third time in two years, physicists have detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, that Albert Einstein predicted the existence of more than 100 years ago with his theory of general relativity.

"Einstein continues to rock, in the sense that we keep pushing the boundaries of his theory," Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University and LIGO data analyst, told Business Insider. "It passes every test that we throw at it."

The waves came from two black holes colliding together about 3 billion light-years from Earth, and a giant experiment called LIGO detected them.

But that's just one of many discoveries that gravitational waves could bring us as new detectors go online and get upgraded.

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Sarah Kramer contributed reporting to this post.