We celebrate the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of the achievements and recent results in gravitational wave research. The three winners made pivotal contributions to the development of the ground-based detector arrays that led to the first detection of gravitational waves from a merging pair of black holes by the advanced LIGO facility in 2015. Members of the Astronomy & Astrophysics group are actively involved in gravitational wave astrophysics, in particular pursuing searches for electromagnetic signatures coincident with gravitational waves and have recently deployed a dedicated facility for this work, GOTO.