B.B.C. Article
Scientists have collected a second burst of gravitational waves sweeping through the Earth.
The warping of space-time was sensed on Christmas Day in the US at the Advanced LIGO laboratories - the same facilities that made the historic first detection in September last year.
Back then, the waves came from two huge coalescing black holes.
This new set of waves, likewise, is ascribed to a black hole merger - but a smaller one.
Reporting the event in the journal Physical Review Letters, the international collaboration that operates LIGO says the two objects involved had masses that were 14 and eight times that of our Sun.
The data indicates the union produced a single black hole of 21 solar masses, meaning they radiated pure energy to space equivalent to the mass of one star of Sun size.

(Continues)

JoeB wrote:It always amazes me that the entire universe is a moving, interacting thing at a human timescale as well, and doesn't just exist of some 'static sparkly thingies up there' as it often seems when looking at the stars.
[edit] I mean it's easy to rationalise, but to actually realise that fact is different somehow, more human I guess.

UPDATE ON LIGO'S SECOND OBSERVING RUN

28 January 2017 --

The second Advanced LIGO run began on November 30, 2016 and is currently in progress. As of January 23 approximately 12 days of Hanford-Livingston coincident science data have been collected, with a scheduled break between December 22, 2016 and January 4, 2017. Average reach of the LIGO network for binary merger events have been around 70 Mpc for 1.4+1.4 Msun, 300 Mpc for 10+10 Msun and 700 Mpc for 30+30 Msun mergers, with relative variations in time of the order of 10%.

So far, 2 event candidates, identified by online analysis using a loose false-alarm-rate threshold of one per month, have been identified and shared with astronomers who have signed memoranda of understanding with LIGO and Virgo for observational followup. A thorough investigation of the data and offline analysis are in progress; results will be shared when available.

- See more at: http://www.ligo.org/news/index.php#O2Jan2017update

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has made a third detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, demonstrating that a new window in astronomy has been firmly opened. As was the case with the first two detections, the waves were generated when two black holes collided to form a larger black hole.

The newfound black hole has a final mass about 49 times that of our sun. This fills in a gap between the masses of the two merged black holes detected previously by LIGO, with solar masses of 62 (first detection) and 21 (second detection).

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The recent detection appears to be the farthest yet, with the black holes located about 3 billion light-years away. (The black holes in the first and second detections are located 1.3 and 1.4 billion light-years away, respectively.)
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more at link...