The LIGO scientific collaboration and the Virgo collaboration announced simultaneously the 11th of February 2016 the detection of the gravitational wave emitted in the coalescence of two black holes. 100 years after the Einstein’s prediction, the last brick of the General Relativity theory of the Gravitation has been verified. But this is not the conclusion of an adventure, but the dawn of a new era: the gravitational wave astronomy and astrophysics. Gravitational Waves are a new and powerful instrument to investigate the Universe, a new probe to understand the fundamental physics phenomena hidden in the catastrophic events involving massive bodies like neutron stars, a new ear listening continuously that could indicate where to point the telescopes in a multi-messenger approach to the study of the Universe.
GraWIToN is a visionary Initial Training Network that first predicted the need to train young researchers in this field in order to have a new generation of scientists capable to lead the future developments in this exciting new research field.
14 Early Stage Researchers (Marie Curie fellowships) are trained for three years and a good fraction of them signed the detection paper, underlying their contribution to the discovery.
I also thanks all my collaborators, in particular Elena Cuoco and Erika Morucci for the incredible contribution they are giving to the project.
I’m proud to have the duty of the coordination of the excellent project that I wanted, designed and proposed with all my energies.
Michele Punturo, INFN Perugia and EGO