Three pioneers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, which announced last year the detection of gravitational waves for the first time, have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics.
LSU Adjunct Professor and MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, along with California Institute of Technology Professor Emeriti Kip Thorne and Barry Barish received the award for their “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says in a news release.
One-half of the prize was awarded to Weiss, and the other half will be shared by Thorne and Barish.
More than 100 years ago, Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, would arrive on Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. Nearly a century later, on Sept. 14, 2015, twin LIGO detectors—one in Livingston Parish on LSU property and the other in Hanford, Washington—detected the collision of two black holes over a billion light years away, confirming a major prediction of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity.
“When we first discovered them back in September 2015 many of us didn’t believe it,” The Washington Post quotes Weiss as saying during a phone call to the Stockholm conference. It took months for the scientists to convince themselves that they had heard gravitational waves, he added.
The work to detect the gravitational waves was done by the LIGO Science Collaboration, or LSC, a team of more than 1,000 scientists from universities in the U.S. and abroad. But in the mid-1970s, Weiss had already analyzed possible sources of background noise that would disturb measurements. He had also designed a laser-based detector that would overcome this noise, the academy says. Weiss, Thorne and Barish “ensured that four decades of effort led to gravitational waves finally being observed.”
“I view this more as a thing that recognizes the work of a thousand people,” Weiss said.
Gabriela González, a LSU Physics and Astronomy professor, served as LIGO’s elected spokesperson at the time of the announcement. She and other leaders of the collaboration made the official statements about the historic detection in February 2016 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“It was an honor to be the LSC spokesperson during the momentous time of discovery,” González says in a statement. “We are thrilled for Rai, Kip and Barry to be named Nobel Laureates and are proud of the work done by many people over many decades in the LSC to support and continue their vision.”
