The LIGO scientific collaboration and the Virgo collaboration announced simultaneously the 11^th 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

The annual ET symposium is organised the next 2-3 February, in Florence, Italy. You can find all the logistic information in the web site of the event.
That event will be the first joint ET-LIGO 3G meeting, focusing on possible future scenarios, the scientific targets and strategies, the enabling technologies needed to realise the 3rd generation GW observatories.
The meeting will be organised around few selected talks allowing long discussions and a poster session is expected.
The structure of workshop is the following:

• Tuesday 2nd, Morning: Global scenario
• Tuesday 2nd, Afternoon: Technologies
• Wednesday 3rd, morning: Global scenario and roadmapping

The workshop is preceded by a meeting focused on the next H2020 call on integration of research infrastructures to be held in the afternoon on February 1st.

FEBRUARY 11th: Scientists to provide an update on the search for gravitational waves

100 years after Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) and the VIRGO Collaboration invite the scientific community at the EGO site in Cascina, Pisa (Italy) for an update on efforts to detect them.

The website of the second GraWIToN School - 1^st DAS School is online:

http://events.ego-gw.it/indico/event/2ndGraWIToNSchool

The school will be held at Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy, from the 9th to the 13th of November, 2015.