Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne awarded with 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 3 October 2017 awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss of LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne of LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration.

They were awarded for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

The universe's gravitational waves were first observed on 14 September 2015. These waves were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago. These waves came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the LIGO detector in the USA.

Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of observing the most violent events in space and testing the limits of knowledge. The Gravitational waves spread at the speed of light, filling the universe, as Albert Einstein described in his general theory of relativity.

About LIGO
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is a collaborative project with over 1000 researchers from more than twenty countries.

The LIGO project's achievement was using a pair of gigantic laser interferometers to measure a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus, as the gravitational wave passed the Earth.