An artist's depiction of a black hole collision event 1.3 billion lightyears away. The recording of gravitational waves emanating from this collision proved the last untested part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (ligo.caltech.edu)

Nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein postulated his Theory of General Relativity, the last remaining unproven part has been observed, potentially offering future insights into the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the universe.

Scientists from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration recorded the existence of gravitational waves, or “ripples” in space-time, created when objects move through deep space. Specifically, the LIGO team observed “” made from two black holes colliding 1.3 billion lightyears away, as reported by The New York Times and announced in an press release.

“We’re actually hearing them go thump in the night,” said Matthew Evans, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, in the statement. “We’re getting a signal which arrives at Earth, and we can put it on a speaker, and we can hear these black holes go, ‘Whoop.’ There’s a very visceral connection to this observation. You’re really listening to these things which before were somehow fantastic.”

The New York Times heralded this discovery as one of the most-important scientific advances in recent years. The recorded sound will go down in history as one of science's watershed moments, the paper noted. Karsten Danzmann, from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany, who worked on the scientific collaboration, told the BBC it's . “There is no doubt,” he said.

LIGO scientists at work. Lasers fired through long tunnels are able to sense ripples in the fabric of space-time, known as gravitational waves. (National Science Foundation/LIGO)

The observed — areas in space with gravitational pulls so great not even light can escape — are more than 30 times the size of the sun. When they fused in a collision, they emanated energy “equivalent to about three solar masses — according to Einstein's equation E=mc2 — in the form of gravitational waves," the press release noted.

“For a very short amount of time, the actual power in gravitational waves was higher than all the light in the visible universe,” Peter Fritschel, LIGO’s chief detector scientist and a senior research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said.

Sheila Rowan, one of the lead U.K. researchers on the LIGO team, told the BBC that this is the beginning of a "terrifically exciting" period of discovery.

"The fact that we are sitting here on Earth feeling the actual fabric of the Universe stretch and compress slightly due to the merger of black holes that occurred just over a billion years ago — I think that's phenomenal,” she said. “It's amazing that when we first turned on our detectors, the Universe was ready and waiting to say 'hello'."

The event was observed in September 2015; the paper describing the discovery was published on Feb. 11, 2016, in the journal .

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The ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, during observations. (ESO/S. Brunier)