Nobel Prize Physics winners announced

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced, with one half awarded to Rainer Weiss and the other half shared between Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for their work on gravitational waves.

In September 2015, gravitational waves were detected for the first time using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). These waves, predicted by Albert Einstein a century earlier, were caused by a collision between two black holes, approximately 1.3bn years ago.

The LIGO project consists of more than 1000 researchers from at least 20 countries. Weiss and Thorne, along with Barish, helped make the project a reality. In the mid-1970s, Weiss had analysed possible sources of background noise that could affect gravitational wave readings and designed a laser-based interferometer capable of overcoming this.

Thorne and Weiss were convinced that these waves could be detected on Earth and pushed hard for a project that would become known as LIGO. Barish became the second director of LIGO in 1994, at a time when the project was in danger of being cancelled. He managed to prevent this, and construction was completed in 1999 with the first measurement in 2002.

Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, and since 2015, has been detected on four other occasions, most recently in August. Weiss is an emeritus professor at MIT and Thorne and Barish are both professors at Caltech.