Kate Becker: Hunting high and low for gravitational waves
(World News Science)

Kate Becker The Visible Universe This year`s physics Nobel Prize announcement came with a sort of joyful inevitability. Few were surprised that Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, three physicists whose ideas were key to the first direct detection of gravitational waves, each got a share of the 2017 prize. The three worked on the gravitational wave detector LIGO, a flagship experiment of the National Science Foundation, involving hundreds of scientists and decades of planning, construction and patient waiting. Using a system of lasers and mirrors, LIGO directly measured vibrations in space-time radiating out from the collision of two black holes more than a billion light years from...