http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/here-s-first-person-spot-those-gravitational-waves

"Here’s the first person to spot those gravitational waves
By Adrian ChoFeb. 11, 2016 , 11:30 AM

Today, physicists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that after decades of effort they had detected gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime itself—set off by the explosive collision of two massive black holes. But which of the 1000 scientists who work on LIGO, a pair of gargantuan instruments in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, was the first to see the long-awaited signal?

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Marco Drago wasn’t in Louisiana or Washington, or even the United States. Instead, the 33-year-old postdoc from Padua, Italy, was at his office at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, Germany, where members of the LIGO team work on data analysis. There, Drago oversees one of four data “pipelines,” automated computer systems that comb through the raw data coming out of the two detectors looking for potentially interesting signals. On 14 September 2015, while Drago was on the phone with a LIGO colleague in Italy, his pipeline sent him an email alert—of which he receives about one each day—telling him that both LIGO detectors had registered an “event” (a nonroutine reading) 3 minutes earlier, at 11:50:45 a.m. local time. It was a big one. “The signal-to-noise ratio was quite high—24 as opposed to [the more typical] 10,” he says."