US-based trio share Nobel physics prize

British scientists can claim some of the credit for the work that has resulted in three researchers in the United States winning the Nobel prize for physics.

On 3 October, the prize committee named professors Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss as the winners of the 2017 prize for their work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (or Ligo) project.

In 2015, they found the first evidence of gravitational waves—the ‘ripples in space-time’ predicted by Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity—which in this case were the product of a collision between two black holes.