Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss of the United States have won the Nobel Physics Prize for the discovery of gravitational waves, the Associated Press reported.

Axar.az reports citing Guardian.

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves," the statement read.

The secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday before naming the winners that the scientists made a "discovery that shook the world."

LIGO is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

The Nobel Prize in Physics is traditionally awarded after the prize in Medicine. On Monday, three American scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on the work of internal biological clocks in organisms.

The 2016 prize went to three British-born researchers who applied the mathematical discipline of topology to help understand the workings of exotic matter such as superconductors and superfluids. In 2014, a Japanese and a Canadian shared the physics prize for studies that proved that the elementary particles called neutrinos have mass.

In 2017, each Nobel Prize winner gets nine million Swedish crowns, approximately one million dollars.