The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for detection of gravitational waves
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for the breakthroughs in research on gravitational waves, and significant contribution in the development of the LIGO detector, whose main task is to monitor and try to localize the sources of gravitational waves that cause the so-called „spacetime wrinkles”.
“On 14 September 2015, gravitational waves were observed for the first time. The waves, the existence of which was predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, were caused by a collision of two black holes. It took them 1,3 billion years to reach the LIGO detector in the United States” - the Nobel Committee informs in the justification of the verdict.
In September at the conference in Turin, the LIGO and Virgo scientific consortia informed about the fourth detection of gravitational waves emitted by merging double black holes systems. The Polgraw team, a member of the Virgo project, is a group of scientists from Polish institutions coordinated by prof. Andrzej Królak from IM PAN.
