An interpreter at a negotiation doesn't strain to catch every word; they grab the overall meaning, and that's why they can keep up with the speech. That's how the search for long gravitational waves works now too: ripples in space born, for instance, from pairs of very light black holes.

Such black holes may be lighter than the Sun and may have formed at the very beginning of the Universe. Their gravitational signal in detectors on Earth can stretch on for years. In the past, to find it, computers had to sift through an enormous number of possibilities, and that took far too long.

Tests showed that processing speeds up by tens and hundreds of times. Thanks to this, signals from black holes can be heard even from a neighboring galaxy: the Andromeda Nebula. A check on real detector data confirmed that the method works correctly.

An interpreter who has grasped the meaning can keep up with any conversation. In just the same way, the new method lets us hear the long whisper of the cosmos without waiting for computers to finish their slow work.