Another great success for the Gravitational Wave research field: today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne (LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration) for the discovery of the Gravitational Wave signal emitted by the coalescence of a binary system of black holes (GW150914). The detection has been the result of a great scientific, technological, human and financial effort thanks the collaboration of several countries for decades. The three Nobel prize awarded scientists, together other few pioneers, like Adalberto Giazotto and Alain Brillet in Europe, had the capability to believe, many years ago, to the possibility to reach what was considered impossible by Albert Einstein: the detection of gravitational waves.
The LIGO and Virgo collaborations realised this dream and now we are celebrating this success with a wonderful Nobel prize. The GraWIToN project, funded by the European Commission under the Marie Curie Actions, is contributing to the gravitational wave research training young researchers that are playing an active role in the current researches and will be first level actors in the future. As GraWIToN project coordinator I would like to thanks all the young researches for their efforts and the persons that are contributing to make GraWIToN a successful initiative, Elena Cuoco, the Scientific Coordinator of GraWIToN and Erika Morucci, the financial responsible.
GraWIToN is approaching to its conclusion, but, obviously, this adventure will not finish here!
Michele Punturo
GraWIToN Project Coordinator