This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with one half to Riner Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry

C. Barish and Kip S. Thorn, all of them members of the LIGO Virgo Collaboration.

And the Academy Citation runs for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.

Jern Hansen, Secretary General of the Academy at 552 this morning Eastern Time.

Rheinervais was born in 1932 in Berlin in Germany.

He received his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States,

and he is still affiliated with the MIT as Professor of Physics.

Dr. Vices, since many years, a US citizen.

Barry Parish was born in 1936 in Nebraska in the United States.

He is a professor of physics at Cal Tech, the California Institute of Technology.

And finally, Kip Thorne was born in 1940 in Utah in the US, and he is currently professor of theoretical physics at Caltech.

And as I mentioned, all Thino Bellorets are members of the LIGO Virgo Collaboration, a large team of more than a thousand scientists who built and ran the detector that was used to discover gravitational waves.

And with that, I'll give the word. gravitational waves.

And with that, I'll give the word to the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Nils Mortonson.

On the 14th of September 2015, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory LIGO

succeeded for the first time to directly observe gravitational waves. These waves

were predicted by Einstein a hundred years ago, but until now they have escaped direct detection.

This is a truly remarkable achievement which crowns almost 50 years of experimental efforts by hundreds of scientists and engineers.

And today, the LIGO Collaboration includes a thousand members from 90 institutions in five continents.

We now witness the dawn of a new field, gravitational wave astronomy.

This will teach us about the most violent processes in the universe and it will lead to new

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