AKIPRESS.COM - Scientists announced Thursday that they have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the violent merging of two black holes in deep space.

The detection was hailed as a triumph for a controversial, exquisitely crafted, billion-dollar physics experiment and as confirmation of a key prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, reports WP.

It will also inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe, scientists declared at a euphoric news briefing at the National Press Club in Washingtont.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it!" said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), drawing applause from an audience that included many of the luminaries of the physics world. The briefing was watched around the globe by physicists who have long waited for such a detection.

Some of the scientists gathered for the announcement had spent decades conceiving and constructing LIGO.

“For me, this was really my dream. It’s the golden signal for me," said Alessandra Buonanno of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, who started working on theoretical models of gravitational waves in 2000 and flew to Washington for the announcement.

The observatory, described as "the most precise measuring device ever built," is actually two facilities in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Wash. They were built and operated with funding from the National Science Foundation, which has spent $1.1 billion on LIGO over the course of several decades.

The project is led by scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is supported by an international consortium of scientists and institutions. Gabriela Gonzalez, a physics professor at Louisiana State University who is the spokesperson for LIGO, said during Thursday's news conference that the work relied on the efforts of "a worldwide village." The scientific paper published Thursday names 1,004 individual authors.