"The speed of gravity, like the speed of light, is one of the fundamental constants of the universe," says Neil Cornish from the University of Montana. "Until the appearance of gravitational waves, we had no way of directly measuring the speed of gravity."

![content_ligo_black_holes_grav_waves_2017_1024.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmRBanrnK3iUgGXrHJLuhJ6SbLreyJ6LB1raV8H4zysC36/content_ligo_black_holes_grav_waves_2017_1024.jpg)

Neutron stars, being tens of times more massive objects that are thousands of light-years away from each other, at the last moment before the collision create gravitational waves that divergent in the universe. When they reached us, they became tens of thousands of times smaller than the proton and reduced their speed to one-fifth of a second. Comparing the data obtained by several observatories, scientists were able to get an idea of the overall wave speed.

![spacetime.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUXk8HdTMqh8UKCpWxRrSFThqrqArdqMedfE8n8iqnpCo/spacetime.jpg)

In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cornish and his colleagues from CERN and the University of Bern (Switzerland) combined data on three gravitational waves recorded by the LIGO and Virgo observatories and were able to determine the speed of gravity: it is approximately 45% of the speed of light.

Several centuries ago, Isaac Newton suggested that the speed of gravity is infinitely large. However, GRT restricts it to the speed of light.