If the Ligo can detect something so far away, maybe we can turn it inwards to look at the gravitational map of our sun and possibly other planets in our solar system.
These fields would fluctuate all the time as planets pass each other

So how do they know that the measurement indicated on their equipment was caused by that specific event that happened 1.3 billion years ago? Surely the event itself would have have taken thousands of years to complete, why is a few milliseconds of recording attributed to an event lasting thousands of years. They haven't even begun to discover the extents of the universe! Heck, a whole new planet has just supposedly been discovered the other day that's in our solar system.

Actually the gravitational vawes were jointly detected in U.S. and Italy, near Pisa. The L-shaped interferometer can be clearly seen here: https://goo.gl/maps/8zfu9oMUSmF2

DEAR IDP:
Maybe this article by astronomer Phil Plait will explain things better: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/02/11/gravitational_waves_finally_detected_at_ligo.html

Celebrate as Einstein and Newton is partying with Darwin on his 207th birthday today!

How are they so sure that the sensitive instruments picked up two voids or ( black holes)colliding. When those same instruments are fixed by gravity on this planet, it could also have been an earth shudder....Since if it were and event of that magnitude as ripples on a pond, there were or will still be more to come...

Of course, all of this is so little for all the energy put into the experiment. Gravity has been engineered for over a century but kept totally secret from the public, as revealed in books like “The Covert Colonization of Our Solar System” and “Secret Science and the Secret Space Program.” Thomas Townsend Brown experimentally discovered the link between Electromagnetism and Gravity in the 1920s and Nikola Tesla even earlier. Brown even developed a gravitational wave communication device in the 1950s. So, this is much ado about almost nothing. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1478768835 http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Science-Space-Program/dp/057815238X

I would like to ask could the rings of Saturn be used to detect gravity waves? Would not waves passing thru the Saturn system disrupt them and that disturbance be detected by a laser beam thru or across the rings? Thank you for considering and commenting on this., Jim

Exactly what I was thinking Bob, a plate ripple would cause the same effect. Before the scientist get so excited about the theory being proven they would have to prove the latter did not occur. Maybe they did but this article does not mention that fact. I believe Einstein's theory was correct but not convinced that this test has proven anything. I'm not a scientist, just a cynic, what do I know?

Wow! One thousandth the width of a proton in a chunk of stuff 2.5mile long strains credulity..!

.. For me, because even on the last tenth of a millimetere of the very ends of a 2.5 mile anything, is a pile of billions of protons, all in motion, having only a probability of positions, knowledge of which is apparently limited (Heisenberg).

Then the 2.5 mile thing, attached to an Earth which is shifted and waggled by every sesmic tremor remnant, any one of which is orders of magnitude larger than the (unknown) journey of said protons.

Yet all of this is on a thing (Earth) where the centre of mass is not in the middle, but is distributed, with much of it internally on the move. Pulled by the moon, and the Planets, and our Sun, and rocked by tides, and on smaller scale, by every other galactic event between here and 1.3 billion light years away.

Data correlation gone mad! How we know, with such certainty, that these two detectors were looking at this distant place, instead of experiencing something that would have tweaked them both.

Maybe if we had some of these grav-wave detectors elsewhere than on the same Earth, instead of both being on the same tectonic plate!

OK - if true, then I have to be impressed, and congratulatory!

I am also a now bit alarmed about how much I don't understand about position measurement science, and how we know that viewing something (say optically) happen at the same time as the detector wiggled could not have been replaced by some other event elsewhere. There is so much universe, such must be happening almost continuously!

To cap it all, the only way the information about these events could have arrived here after 1.3 billion years still requires us to accept that in the beginning, that mass somehow, near instantaneously banged it's way to this far distant place, without the need to obey the speeds of the very waves that now arrive, or they would have passed away from us long ago.