The discovery of gravity waves could "revolutionise astronomy", Professor Stephen Hawking said as he congratulated scientists on their ground-breaking work.

The top cosmologist said the breakthrough tallies with predictions he made more than 40 years ago at Cambridge University.

He told the BBC: "Gravitational waves provide a completely new way of looking at the universe. The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionise astronomy.

"This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary system and the first observation of black holes merging."

Prof Hawking, research director at Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, added: "The observed properties of this system is consistent with predictions about black holes that I made in 1970 here in Cambridge. The area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes as predicted by my black hole area theorem."

Asked what more could be discovered if scientists scan for gravitational waves, he said: "Apart from testing general relativity we could hope to see black holes throughout the history of the universe."

He added: "We may even see relics of the very early universe during the big bang at the most extreme energies possible."

Paying tribute to the UK's contribution to the discovery, Professor John Womersley, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, said: "It has taken 100 years and the combined work of many hundreds of the cleverest scientists, engineers and mathematicians on Earth to prove that this key prediction of Albert Einstein is correct, and show that gravitational waves exist.

"Of course Einstein was always the smartest guy in the room. Today's results also remind us just how important the UK's contribution to world-leading science is. I'd certainly like to think that some of the smartest people on earth today are living and working in the UK."

Not only was this the first time anyone had detected a gravity wave, but the discovery also marked the first confirmation of two black holes fusing together.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (Ligo) project began 25 years ago but the search for the waves began in earnest last September.

Theoretical physicist Professor Kip Thorne, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who originally proposed the Ligo experiment in the 1980s, said the detection of gravity waves would make it possible to spot black holes tearing stars apart, and perhaps violent phenomena previously unknown to science."

He added: "Until now, we have only seen spacetime when it's calm. We have only seen the surface of the ocean on a calm day when it's quite glassy. We have never seen the ocean riled by a violent storm with crashing waves before."

Dr Ed Daw, from the University of Sheffield, who has been researching gravitational waves with Ligo since 1998, said: "Discoveries of this importance in physics come along about every 30 years.

"A measure of its significance is that even the source of the wave - two black holes in close orbit, each tens of times heavier than the Sun, which then collide violently - has never been observed before, and could not have been observed by any other method. This is just the beginning."

Professor Martin Hendry, head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, said: "Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is regarded as one of the most impressive scientific achievements of all time and the existence of black holes is one of the theory's most startling predictions.

"To see such clear and direct confirmation of this prediction, and moreover that the merger of two black holes converts enormous amounts of mass into the energy of gravitational waves, is a wonderful vindication of Einstein's masterwork a century after it was written."

Another Ligo scientist, Professor Gabriela Gonzalez, from Louisiana State University, compared the achievement to that of the 16th century pioneer of modern astronomy, Galileo Galilei.

She said: "It's monumental - like Galileo using the telescope for the first time."