Aerial view of the LIGO interferometer in Hanford, Washington. [Photo/Xinhua]

Will this detection win a Nobel Prize?

It is nailed on. A certainty. As ever, the debate will be about the recipients and their place in the chain of discovery. Who will be regarded as having made the most significant contribution? Will the recipients be theorists or experimentalists in that chain? One thing is clear: it is in the nature of science today that the really big questions tend to be answered with the aid of really big machines. And without the LIGO Collaboration's many hundreds of participants, who work across diverse fields on a range of complex technologies, this moment would never have come.

NASA, BBC contributed to the story.