AMN
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three US scientists for the detection of gravitational waves.
Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the nine million kronor prize.
The ripples were predicted by Albert Einstein and are a fundamental consequence of his General Theory of Relativity.
The winners are members of the Ligo-Virgo observatories, which were responsible for the breakthrough. The winners join a prestigious list of 204 other Physics laureates recognised since 1901.
Prof Weiss gets half of the prize money, while Barish and Thorne will share the other half. Gravitational waves describe the stretching and squeezing of space-time that occurs when massive objects accelerate.
The warping of space resulting from the merger of two black holes was initially picked up by the US Ligo laboratory in 2015 – the culmination of a decades-long quest. Three more examples have been detected since then.
In 2016 — 100 years after Einstein published his idea — the physicists published a paper detailing how they had detected gravitational waves rippling from the collision and merging of two black holes — each with roughly 30 times the mass of the sun.
The milestone event made Weiss, Thorne and Drever celebrities and earned them a raft of awards, even as Drever’s health was failing last year. Barish’s involvement began in the early 1990s, first as an investigator and then, in 1997, as its director during pivotal times for the project.
The facility the physicists built to detect that event is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which operates two huge detectors in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Wash.
NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel explained how the LIGO facilities work:
“Each detector looks like a big L, made up of two tunnels 2.5 miles long. It’s designed so that if a gravitational wave passes by, it will stretch space along one direction of the tunnel and squish space along the direction of the other. The stretching and squishing changes the tunnels’ lengths by a tiny amount, and that change can be detected by lasers.”