The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C Barish and Kip S Thorne.


According to the Guardian, the three American physicists have won the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.


Rainer Weiss has been awarded one half of the 9m Swedish kronor (825,000) prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm today. Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the other half of the prize. All three scientists have played a leading role in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or Ligo, experiment, which made the first historic observation of gravitational waves in September 2015.