UPDATE: LIGO announced this morning (October 16, 2017) that during their last run, a gravitational wave from the collision of two neutron stars was detected for the first time. By using the Virgo detector along with gamma rays from the event picked up by NASA’s Fermi telescope, they were able to triangulate the source of the signal to a very small area of the sky. About 70 ground and space-based telescopes located the star merger, making this the first cosmic event observed by both gravitational waves and light-based methods. You can read the press release here: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-release-gw170817 
Sometimes, scientists have to build something really big to find something really tiny. In this case, something measuring less than a quintillionth of an inch. 
The LIGO project, involving a team of more than a thousand researchers around the world, just made a huge breakthrough in their observation of gravitational waves. The two main observatories, one of which is in Livingston Parish, have made 3 more wave detections since the first one in 2015. However, the most recent one was special– it was also picked up by a third detector, the newly-updated Virgo Observatory in Italy. 
The implications of this are staggering. Having 3 working detectors instead of 2 means that scientists can triangulate the location that the source of the wave came from. Locating black holes and other supermassive objects in the universe just became much more feasible.   
I got a top-to-bottom tour of the LIGO observatory in Livingston, including an exclusive look at the main laser room where the actual beam that measures the gravitational waves originates. My guide was LIGO researcher and LSU grad student Terra Hardwick, who told me that less than a hundred people, period, had ever been in the laser room. 
Gravitational waves are the result of collisions between massive objects. All of LIGO’s detections so far have been from binary systems of black holes that spiraled around each other until violently merging. When this happens, not only is an unimaginable amount of energy released, the actual fabric of space-time itself ripples outward, similar to the waves produced by dropping a rock into a pond. As Terra put it, when these waves pass through space they create a disturbance that momentarily changes the very definition of distance. 
Now that the third detector is up and running, there are sure to be many more breakthrough discoveries. Whatever they may be, it is certain that LIGO will continue to make waves around the world.