ngaru tō ā-papa

Gravitational waves are waves of spacetime distortion and curvature produced by the relative motion of gravitating masses and which propagate away at the speed of light. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic waves. In 1916, Albert Einstein demonstrated that gravitational waves result from his general theory of relativity as "ripples in spacetime".