4 May 2016 — The three principal founders of LIGO, along with the entire LIGO discovery team, have been awarded The 2016 Gruber Prize in Cosmolgy, the Gruber Foundation announced.
Ronald W.P. Drever (Caltech), Kip S. Thorne (Caltech), and Rainer Weiss (MIT) will each receive a gold medal and will share a $500,000 award. The Prize citation reads: “The Gruber Foundation proudly presents the 2016 Cosmology Prize to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, Ronald Drever, and the entire LIGO team for pursuing a vision to observe the universe in gravitational waves, leading to a first detection that emanated from the collision of two black holes. This remarkable event provided the first glimpse into the strong‐gravity regime of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that governs the dynamics of black holes, giving direct evidence for their existence, and demonstrating that their nature is consistent with the predictions of general relativity.”