Barish, Thorne, Weiss Win 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics

(Bloomberg) -- Rainer Weiss from Germany, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne, both from the U.S., were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The winners got the prize for their "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on Tuesday. "The waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, 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 U.S."

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968. The total amount for each of the 2017 prizes is 9 million kronor ($1.1 million), up from 8 million kronor last year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Veronica Ek in Stockholm at vek@bloomberg.net, Hanna Hoikkala in Stockholm at hhoikkala@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net, Niklas Magnusson, Kim Robert McLaughlin