Here is more about the announcement today and the research leading up to things:

One 14 September 2015, they picked up a relatively big change in their Livingston lab in Louisiana, what you’d call a blip in the system. Then, 7 milliseconds later, they detected the same blip with their lab in Hanford, Washington, 4,000 km away, suggesting that it had been caused by a gravitational wave passing through Earth.

In the months since, researchers have been rigorously studying this signal to see if it could have been caused by anything else. But the overwhelming conclusion is that the blip was caused by gravitational waves – the discovery has statistical significant of 5.1 sigma, which means there’s only a 1 in 6 million chance that the result is a fluke.

In fact, the signal almost perfectly matches up with what scientists predicted gravitational waves would look like, based on Einstein’s theory.

“The discovery of this gravitational wave suggests that merging black holes are heavier and more numerous than many researchers previously believed,” said LIGO researcher Eric Thrane, from Monash University in Australia. “This bodes well for detection of large populations of distant black holes … It will be intriguing to see what other sources of gravitational waves are out there, waiting to be discovered.”

This will likely shape the space modeling done by NASA as well as many fields of physics in regards to future endeavors.

Check back for more updates and feel free to comment with your ideas in regards to this finding!

thanks to sciencealert.com for the great info