The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss, LIGO/VIRGO Collaborationand, and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration, and Kip S. Thorne, LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration, “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”

In this YouTube video, the work by Weiss et. al. is describe and also there is a live feed from the US to Switzerland where Dr. Weiss speaks to the Academy and the Swiss press. It is a very informative exchange.

Description of the LIGO Interferometer from Royal Swedish Academy Popular Science Background article.

The vacuum systems for LIGO are quite significant. But today everyone is focused on the physics. The gravitational waves detected are generated by some of the most violent events ever conceived by humans, yet the detection of gravitational waves is quite a challenge. These space-time distortions are on the order of 1/10,000^th of the diameter of an atomic nucleus.

Congratulations to the LIGO and VIRGO teams for winning this prize. This is a very exciting time for cosmology.