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Laureates  

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Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, Barry C. Barish and LIGO Scientific Collaboration

Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research 2017

Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research

At its meeting in Oviedo, the Jury for the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, made up of Juan Luis Arsuaga Ferreras, Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturáin, Miguel Delibes de Castro, Luis Fernández-Vega Sanz, Cristina Garmendia Mendizábal, Álvaro Giménez Cañete, Bernardo Hernández González, Clara Menéndez Santos, Sir Salvador Moncada, Ginés Morata Pérez, Enrique Moreno González, Teresa Rodrigo Anoro, Inés Rodríguez Hidalgo, Manuel Toharia Cortés, chaired by Pedro Miguel Echenique Landiríbar and with Santiago Carcía Granda as acting secretary, has unanimously decided to confer the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific and Research jointly on physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip S. Thorne, Barry C. Barish and LIGO Scientific Collaboration for the direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time anticipated by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity a century ago now. This achievement provides answers to one of the most important challenges of physics in its entire history. The Award recognizes the individual talent and collective work of more than a thousand researchers belonging to a hundred institutions in eighteen different countries. The LIGO project supposes a technological challenge of prime importance. The extraordinary precision achieved by its instruments has allowed the observation of the merger of very massive black holes that occurred more than a thousand million years ago. The detection of gravitational waves opens up a new window for the study of the Universe that will allow the discovery of new phenomena and the study of regions of space-time that have as yet been non-accessible using current techniques.

Oviedo, 14th June 2017

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