Galactic discovery in Southeast Louisiana leads to Nobel Prizes

Nobel Prize in Physics was announced on Tuesday to three top professors from the United States of America, Dr Rainer Weiss, Dr Kip Thorne and Dr Barry Barish has been honoured with the £825,000 prize.

Professor of theoretical physics at Caltech Kip Thorne (R) and Emeritus professor of physics at MIT Rainer Weiss (L) listen to remarks on the discovery of gravitational waves during a press conference in Washington, D.C., last year.

Weiss won half the prize, with Barish and Thorne sharing the other half.

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics are shared by three scientists, announced the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday.

Gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, captured by space detectors can be used to discover when and how some of the universe's largest black holes were born.

Few will be surprised with the news that the key players behind the discovery of gravitational waves have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2017.

Pioneer in gravitational waves astronomy in India, Sanjeev Dhurandhar said Indian contribution played a major role, especially in extracting signal from noise, in detecting the gravitational waves.

The discovery's announcement a few months later caused a sensation among scientists and the public. Technically, anything with mass creates these waves, but it takes cataclysms on a enormous scale, such as the merging of two black holes, to generate gravitational waves strong enough for us to detect - and even then, by the time they reach Earth, the disturbances are occurring on a subatomic scale.

Using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), scientists were able to use two giant lasers interferometers to detect minute changes thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus.

Nobel prize in physics was established by the will of Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel and awarded since 1901. "Gravitational waves contain information about their explosive origins and the nature of gravity that can not be obtained from other astronomical signals".

"Einstein was obviously right again, and the prize goes to the leaders of the worldwide team for the discovery that shook the world". In 1916, the renowned physicist said his theory of general relativity meant that gravitational waves could exist.