The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
It gives great satisfaction to LNGS researchers, colleagues of Barish from 1989 to 2000, when he directed the US collaboration of MACRO experiment.