A New Era For Astronomy Has Begun

David Reitze of the California Institute of Technology and the executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, speaks at the National Press Club in Washington on Oct. 16. He talks of one of the most violent events in the cosmos, the collision of neuron stars, that was witnessed completely for the first time in August.

Astronomy is forever changed by the viewing of the collision of neutron stars; we can now watch these processes in many different ways as they run their course, says astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser.

(Image credit: Susan Walsh/AP)