It's a big universe. And there's big stuff going on in it:

Astronomers across the world announced on Thursday that they have found the first evidence of a long-theorised form of gravitational waves that create a "background hum" rumbling throughout the universe.

The breakthrough -- made by hundreds of scientists using radio telescopes in North America, Europe, China, India and Australia after years of work -- was hailed as a major milestone that opens a new window into the universe.

Note that this is a distinct phenomenon from the "high-frequency" waves first identified by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in 2015. That major breakthrough confirmed more than a century's predictions of the effects that massive black hole mergers have on spacetime itself.

This month's discovery, meanwhile, involves "low-frequency gravitational waves" which were "thought to be constantly rolling through space like background noise."

As it turns out, they are: The universe is "awash with gravitational waves," according to Michael Keith of the European Pulsar Timing Array.

(I'm gonna theorize those waves sound a lot like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack)

The scientists used the study of pulsars, incredibly dense cores of stars that can spin many hundreds of times per second and act like extremely reliable clocks throughout the universe. Gravitational waves can have a variant effect on these clock-like pulses, providing evidence of the waves themselves.

How sensitive were the machines used to examine the pulsars?

French astrophysicist Antoine Petiteau said they were able to "detect changes of less than one millionth of a second across more than 20 years".

That'll do it! The waves, as one scientist put it, are projected to be "the sum of all of the supermassive black hole binary systems whirling around each other at the cores of galaxies everywhere in the universe."

I guess I'm not sure entirely what that means but this is definitely a big discovery and I'm here for it.