**Research Firsts Exhibition: Image and accompanying text by the Institute for Gravitational Research** ![colourful artwork of an astronomical scene divided into two contrasting parts with a V-shaped boundary][1] Artwork by Laurence Datrier 14 September 2015, the first observation of gravitational waves! Decades of research were required to develop detectors able to measure gravitational waves, and algorithms to identify their astrophysical sources. Scientists from the Institute for Gravitational Research, as part of the international LIGO Scientific & Virgo Collaboration, were central in this science. This artistic representation of the first detection created by PhD student Laurence Datrier shows two merging black holes creating ripples in spacetime (the gravitational waves) above a time–frequency spectrogram showing the characteristic chirp of a gravitational-wave signal; the dividing red line represents the lasers of the LIGO detectors. [1]: https://mfr.osf.io/export?url=https://osf.io/download/j9k7f/?direct=&mode=render&format=2400x2400.jpeg