the masses of the black holes that produced it, their orbital speed, and the precise moment at which their surfaces touched.

It offers confirmation of one of relativity theory’s most important predictions about black holes—namely, that they radiate away imperfections in the form of gravitational waves after they coalesce.

the three bursts of energy that the new, larger black hole gave off as it became spherical. “Seeing the ringdown is spectacular,”

are substantially heavier than expected, a surprise that, if confirmed by future observations, may help to explain how the mysterious supermassive black holes at the heart of many galaxies are formed

extracted an astonishing amount from the signal

Peters, who had volunteered for years without controversy, was badly shaken. She worried how the attention might affect the school. If you want me to leave, she told the principal, I will.

“She made a comment as I walked away that she wondered how I could sleep at night with the way I treat people. I went inside and started crying I was so upset,” Peters wrote.

Did she have anything in her car she shouldn’t have? No. Could he search her car? Absolutely.

Parents had entrusted their own kids to Peters for years; she was the school’s PTA president and the heart of its after-school program.

She told herself she had nothing to fear, that all he’d find inside her PT Cruiser was beach sand, dog hair, maybe one of her daughter’s toys.

The LIGO team includes a small group of people whose job is to create blind injections—bogus evidence of a gravitational wave—as a way of keeping the scientists on their toes

“I couldn’t understand what Weber was up to,” he said in an oral history conducted by Caltech in 2000. “I didn’t think it was right. So I decided I would go at it myself.”

The detector in Livingston, Louisiana, sits on swampland east of Baton Rouge, surrounded by a commercial pine forest; the one in Hanford, Washington, is on the southwestern edge of the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, amid desert sagebrush, tumbleweed, and decommissioned reactors.

This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided.

In the search for gravitational waves, “most of the action takes place on the phone,” Fred Raab, the head of LIGO’s Hanford site, told me.

LIGO is part of a larger effort to explore one of the more elusive implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he told me. “It was along these lines: ‘Holy shit, what is this?’ ” Vicky Kalogera, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, was in meetings all day, and didn’t hear the news until dinnertime. “My husband asked me to set the table,” she said. “I was completely ignoring him, skimming through all these weird e-mails and thinking, What is going on?” Rainer Weiss, the eighty-three-year-old physicist who first suggested building LIGO, in 1972, was on vacation in Maine. He logged on, saw the signal, and yelled “My God!” loudly enough that his wife and adult son came running.

When Drago saw the signal, he was stunned. “It was difficult to understand what to do,” he told me.

About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape

“I feel safe here,” she says.

tall, lanky man sat alone on a bench outside Courtroom 62. He was absorbed in the yellow legal pad balanced on his lap, silently mouthing what he had written there

Duff now mocked the story of the smartphone swap. If his wife had really been sneaking around Peters’ apartment complex in possession of his BlackBerry, wouldn’t she have worried about it going off unexpectedly?

Then she would take the stand at her husband’s trial, immune from the threat of jail. If she could testify credibly that she had planted the drugs, he would go free too. Game over.

acquittal.

Her daughter, Sydnie, who turned 11 that year, refused to sleep alone, fearing she would be abducted.

He didn’t reveal what the crime lab had just reported: Jill Easter’s DNA was on the pot pipe and the Vicodin pills, though not on the Percocet. And Kent Easter’s DNA was on all three.

The label said EZY Dose Pill Pouch.

videotaping the crosswalk as kids moved through it.

She requested a restraining order, claiming that Peters was “harassing and stalking myself and my 6-year-old son,” and had threatened to kill her. The court threw it out.

“She stated that what she is doing isn’t harassment, that she is fully within her rights and that she is going to continue until Kelli is gone,”

“She made a comment as I walked away that she wondered how I could sleep at night with the way I treat people. I went inside and started crying I was so upset,”

Kent and Jill Easter

“I was calling because, uh, my daughter’s a student at Plaza Vista Elementary School,” said the caller. “And uh, I’m concerned one of the parent volunteers there may be under, uh, under the influence or, uh, using drugs. I was, I just had to go over to the school and, uh, I was, I saw a car driving very erratically.”

Smile, Peters had learned. Be polite

In Irvine, she found a master-planned city where bars and liquor stores, pawnshops and homeless shelters had been methodically purged, where neighborhoods were regulated by noise ordinances, lawn-length requirements and mailbox-uniformity rules.

It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name.

The cop wanted her car keys

a darkened auditorium with 264 silent people in the seats. on the stage, me, sitting on a stool, lit by a spotlight, the only light in the theatre. i hold up a photo of my cat, 10 people applaud, two or three hold up photocopies of the same photo, the rest do nothing, watching, waiting

When Tumblr launched in 2007, the simple layout—text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video—was its primary appeal: less bloggy than Blogger, less puzzling than WordPress. Tumblr’s

Two months later, her blog was gone.

That same year, she turned 15.

“There are just bound to be big surprises.”

“How could he have ever known this?” Weiss asked. “I would love to present him with the data that I saw that morning, to see his face.”

Reitze, Weiss, González, and a handful of others considered who, if anyone, was familiar enough with both the apparatus and the algorithms to have spoofed the system and covered his or her tracks.

“Bubba Roars Off on a Motor Cycle.”)

“And every single one needs to be working correctly so that nothing interferes with the signal.

But doubt spread as other laboratories built bars that failed to match his results.

When two black holes orbit each other, they stretch and squeeze space-time like children running in circles on a trampoline, creating vibrations that travel to the very edge; these vibrations are gravitational waves

The pipes are so long—nearly two and a half miles—that they have to be raised from the ground by a yard at each end, to keep them lying flat as Earth curves beneath them.

LIGO consists of two facilities, separated by nearly nineteen hundred miles—about a three-and-a-half-hour flight on a passenger jet, but a journey of less than ten thousandths of a second for a gravitational wave.

Kalogera hadn’t even told her husband.

The collaborators began the arduous process of double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking their data.

This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching

They’ll decide that after everything has settled down, after they can properly talk to Gypsy.

Gypsy gained 14 pounds in the 12 months she spent in Greene County Jail before her plea.

And they proved quite resilient. At the hearing I attended in September 2015, two people from the largest Facebook group were there. After the hearing, they made a beeline for the local television crew and started talking to them

If Gypsy had, just once, stood up and walked across the room, the spell would have been broken.

Flasterstein never followed up. He told me that in the network of Springfield doctors Dee Dee saw, “everyone bought their story.” He remembers being told to treat the pair with “golden gloves.” He says he thought that if he reported it to social services, they wouldn’t believe him either.

she and Dee Dee were his “favorite mother, daughter patient.” (Beckerman did not reply to requests for comment for this story.)

faking or inducing symptoms of illness where there is some hope of material benefit.

Gypsy told the police that she was 19. Rod and Kristy were able to straighten that out by giving authorities Gypsy’s birth certificate. She was actually 23.

It seemed to give her an appetite for more. While in Springfield, they’d benefit from free flights from a volunteer pilots organization, stays at a lodge for cancer patients, free trips to Disney World through various charity organizations.

so they put her on anti-seizure medications.

In all those years, Gypsy never said a word against her mother or anything else.

The disabled child she’d long been in the eyes of others was nowhere to be found.

in excellent health.

“But I don’t want you talking to Gypsy like that.” Dee Dee took away Gypsy’s phone and computer for a time.

as Gypsy’s mother was constantly by her side

The search warrant didn’t come through until 10:45 that night. The police found Dee Dee’s body in the bedroom. She’d been stabbed, and had been dead for several days. But there was no sign of Gypsy.

“I fucken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER…HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO FUCKEN LOUD LOL.”

Gypsy’s father was a deadbeat, an alcoholic drug abuser who had mocked his daughter’s disabilities,

It was her own father, Gypsy’s grandfather, who’d been the last straw; he’d burned Gypsy with cigarettes.

She had to be homeschooled, because she’d never be able to keep up with other kids. Gypsy had the mind of a child of 7, Dee Dee said.

Dee Dee would often remind people that her daughter had brain damage.

But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out things weren’t as they appeared