Nobel Prize in physics winners: LIGO scientists win award for spotting gravitational waves flowing through the Earth

The find proved Einstein right and gave us a peek at the most mysterious and ancient parts of the universe

Three scientists have won the Nobel prize after spotting huge gravitational waves flowing through the universe.

They were key scientists who helped spot the waves, one of the most fundamental and mysterious forces flowing through the universe. What they saw was the result of two black holes whipping around each other and colliding – and then sending out the disturbance that was later picked up on Earth, by the three winners.

At the time, the work was praised as the discovery of the century, letting us look at the most mysterious and ancient parts of the universe. Now Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne were given the award for their decisive work on that project.

The three experts worked on LIGO, the massive effort to spot the waves flowing through the universe and also "most sensitive instrument ever devised by man", according to the Nobel committee. It was in part a recognition of the work of more than a thousand scientists who worked on that project, it said.

"This is something completely new and different, opening up unseen worlds," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

"A wealth of discoveries awaits those who succeed in capturing the waves and interpreting their message."

The work proved one of Einstein's wildest theories right – a theory that sometimes he didn't even believe himself. They were a key part of his theory of general relativity, which suggests that gravity is the result in curves in space and time.

If that were true, then the waves would be seen flowing through the universe and distorting everything in their path. The wiggle of a highly sensitive instrument in 2016, produced by a colliision 1.3 billion years ago, proved it right.

"The signal was extremely weak when it reached Earth, but is already promising a revolution in astrophysics," the Academy said.

Scientists even suggested at the time of the announcement that the discovery would allow them to create something like a "time machine" that could be used to peer back into some of the most formative and mysterious parts of the universe's past.

The 2017 prize being announced Tuesday by Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences comes with 9 million kronor ($1.1 million). For the past 25 years, the prize has been shared among multiple winners.

Half of the prize went to Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology will split the remaining half between them.

The 2016 prize went to three British-born researchers who applied the mathematical discipline of topology to help understand the workings of exotic matter such as superconductors and superfluids. In 2014, a Japanese and a Canadian shared the physics prize for studies that proved that the elementary particles called neutrinos have mass.

This year's Nobel medicine prize went Monday to three Americans studying circadian rhythms — better known as body clocks: Jeffrey C Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W Young.