{"id":18780,"date":"2017-10-03T19:16:15","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T11:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/no-surprise-nobel-ligo-physicists-win-prize-for-gravitational-wave-discoveries\/"},"modified":"2017-10-03T19:16:15","modified_gmt":"2017-10-03T11:16:15","slug":"no-surprise-nobel-ligo-physicists-win-prize-for-gravitational-wave-discoveries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/no-surprise-nobel-ligo-physicists-win-prize-for-gravitational-wave-discoveries\/","title":{"rendered":"No-surprise Nobel: LIGO physicists win prize for gravitational wave discoveries"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"LIGO
The beamlines for the LIGO detector site at Hanford stretch out across the desert terrain of southeastern Washington. Each arm of the L-shaped detector is 2.5 miles long. (Credit: LIGO)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This year\u2019s Nobel Prize for physics is going, unsurprisingly, to three people who represent the hundreds of researchers behind the first direct detection of gravitational waves at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO.<\/p>\n

Some of those researchers work at the LIGO detector in Hanford, Wash.<\/p>\n

Like the Nobel-winning discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, LIGO\u2019s discovery was the result of decades of work, undertaken with the expectation of finding evidence for an exotic phenomenon that was long predicted.<\/p>\n

But because of the rules for the scientific Nobel Prizes, no more than three physicists could be given a share of the $1.1 million award.<\/p>\n

The Nobel laurels are going to MIT\u2019s Rainer Weiss and Caltech\u2019s Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, who are recognized as ringleaders for the $500 million LIGO project.<\/p>\n

\"Nobel
Caltech\u2019s Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, along with MIT\u2019s Rainer Weiss, are this year\u2019s Nobel laureates in physics, thanks to their work on the LIGO effort to detect gravitational waves. (LIGO \/ Nobel Prize Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a statement issued after today\u2019s prize announcement, Thorne acknowledged that their success was due to far more than the efforts of three people.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe prize rightfully belongs to the hundreds of LIGO scientists and engineers who built and perfected our complex gravitational-wave interferometers, and the hundreds of LIGO and Virgo scientists who found the gravitational-wave signals in LIGO\u2019s noisy data and extracted the waves\u2019 information,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Thorne said it was \u201cunfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelous discovery is the work of more than a thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss seconded that sentiment during a news conference, saying that the Nobel \u201crecognizes the work of a thousand people.\u201d<\/p>\n

LIGO was considered the odds-on favorite for this year\u2019s Nobel Prize in physics, but the laureates didn\u2019t get the official word until early today. Barish said he received the Nobel call on his cellphone around 2:45 a.m. PT, just before the public announcement, and felt a \u201ccomplicated mixture between being thrilled and being humbled.\u201d<\/p>\n

The initial detection, made in September 2015 and announced in February 2016, served as the clearest confirmation of Albert Einstein\u2019s prediction a century earlier that gravitational waves should exist.<\/p>\n