e coming, too, in Japan and in India.
With all these "ears on the cosmos", it should be easier to identify where precisely in the sky the detected events are occurring.
And the European Space Agency is developing a gravitational wave observatory to put in orbit far from Earth. It will launch in the 2030s.
Currently, it's not the grand mission that everybody had hoped for, because the US space agency got in a muddle over its funding some years back and dropped the project. The scale of the mission was therefore redrawn. Many now hope that this historic breakthrough will prompt Nasa to come back in.
"The compromise that was made, to build it in Europe so that the Americans didn't have to contribute, because they weren't going to, was not the best thing to do for the science; not for the size and the risk of doing that space mission," observed MIT's Rai Weiss.
"Consequently, many of us are trying to get the collaboration re-established."
It is really only by going into space and measuring gravitational waves from even bigger events, away from the noisy surface of the Earth, that researchers expect to see small chinks start to emerge in those glorious equations of Einstein.
Who gets the prize?
It is inevitable on these occasions that talk turns to Nobel Prizes. No-one is in any doubt that Thursday's announcement deserves one; the debate, as ever, is over who should receive it. Obvious candidates include the American Kip Thorne, the Scotsman Ron Drever and the German-born Rai Weiss himself. They are regarded as the fathers of LIGO, having proposed the concept back in the 1980s.
But for Jim Hough, who started working on gravitational waves as a postgrad in the late 1970s, it would be appropriate if some of the glory went to the broad collaboration of researchers who made LIGO what it is. One thousand and four authors are listed on the breakthrough paper in Physical Review Letters.
"The Nobel committee should have given a prize to the Large Hadron Collider itself for the detection of the Higgs boson. All those experimentalists worked so hard to do it, and they should have been rewarded for it," he told me.
"But it's quite likely we'll see the same thing happening with gravitational waves, which would be a great pity in my view."