The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three US scientists for the detection of gravitational waves. <br/><br/>Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the nine million kronor prize. <br/><br/>The ripples were predicted by Albert Einstein and are a fundamental consequence of his General Theory of Relativity. <br/><br/>The winners are members of the Ligo-Virgo observatories, which were responsible for the breakthrough. The winners join a prestigious list of 204 other Physics laureates recognised since 1901. <br/><br/>Prof Weiss gets half of the prize money, while Barish and Thorne will share the other half. Gravitational waves describe the stretching and squeezing of space-time that occurs when massive objects accelerate. <br/><br/>The warping of space resulting from the merger of two black holes was initially picked up by the US Ligo laboratory in 2015 – the culmination of a decades-long quest. Three more examples have been detected since then.<br/>