The headline doesn't help, that's for sure. The fact is that gravitational waves have been detected already, though indirectly, and a Nobel prize was awarded fo

The headline doesn't help, that's for sure. The fact is that gravitational waves have been detected already, though indirectly, and a Nobel prize was awarded for the observations more than 20 years ago. That's not why the BICEP2 results are a big deal. The reason this news is important is two fold. One, the researchers were able to observe the effect of "b-mode" gravitational waves during the earliest moments of the big bang (within the first 10^-34 seconds) which reveal important details about the specifics of the big bang. They are indirectly observing an event which is older than all matter in the Universe, older than the cosmic microwave background, older than the cosmic neutrino background, older than dark matter even (which has a high likelihood of originating from the very early Universe when the 4 fundamental forces were still unified). Two, their observations are the first direct test for the theory of cosmic inflation which seems to have produced a definitive result and the result is significant evidence for inflation. That, in turn, translates some theories into realities. For example, we tend to hedge our bets when it comes to estimating the size of the Universe, because only so much of it is visible to us. In a Universe where inflation holds the non-visible Universe must be unimaginably huge compared to the visible portion of it by many orders of magnitude. Also, most inflationary theories effectively produce multiverses (this is hard to explain, basically it's like a foam of different regions of the universe which are effectively universes unto themselves due to speed of light / expansion rate constraints).