American scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry C Barish and Kip S Thorne from the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration, which first detected the gravitational waves, have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, the ripples in space-time created by colliding black holes were first detected in 2015. The three scientists will share the $1.1 million prize money.