A Dis­tant Blast Cre­at­ing Gravitational Waves May Have Al­ready Been De­tected

Al­though no in­stru­ments ex­isted at the time that could have pick­ed up the much-sought “gra­vit­a­tional waves,” the ex­plo­sion re­ported in 1987 may none­the­less have cre­at­ed them, two sci­en­tists claim. They the­o­rise that in the fu­ture, ob­serv­ations of si­m­i­lar ex­plo­sions could help con­firm pro­posed find­ings of gra­vit­at­ional waves.