Rainer Weiss, Barry C Barish and Kip S Thorne win the 2017 Nobel prize in physics – as it happened

The trio have been honoured for their work on constructing Ligo and the detection of gravitational waves - follow the live reaction here

12.41pm BST

It was the result we expected: Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish have won the 2017 Nobel prize in physics for the Ligo instrument and its detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago.

You can read our news story on the prize here. An article on what gravitational wave observatories will mean for science will follow.

12.32pm BST

Not to be parochial, but a good number of British scientists work on the Ligo project, with researchers from Glasgow, Birmingham and Cardiff universities all contributing to the construction of the instrument and analysis of the results.

Professor B S Sathyaprakash, head of the gravitational physics group at Cardiff University, said:

It took 100 years to confirm the existence of gravitational waves but our observations over the past two years have already raised questions about the formation and evolution of black holes and allowed us to test Einstein's gravity to incredibly greater precision than was possible before. We are beginning to understand if Nature's black holes are truly spacetime warpage as predicted by general relativity and if the nature of gravitational waves is as predicted by Einstein.