The 2017 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to three US scientists for the detection of gravitational waves, the BBC reports.
Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish will share the nine million kronor (£831,000) prize.
The ripples were predicted by Albert Einstein and are a fundamental consequence of his General Theory of Relativity.
The winners are members of the Ligo-Virgo observatories, which were responsible for the breakthrough.
Gravitational waves describe the stretching and squeezing of space-time that occurs when massive objects accelerate.
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.
