Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

The Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to the founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) group, Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and Ronald Drever, and scores of physicists and engineers from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. Drever, Thorne and Weiss will share $1m between them, with the remaining $2m shared equally among the 1,012 other researchers and engineers on the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. The prize will be awarded at a formal ceremony later this year. Congratulations, LIGO Team!