The international team of over 1,000 scientists that made the first observation of gravitational waves in 2015 and announced this discovery in February 2016 has been awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics that comes with a $3 million reward.

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Gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 in his general theory of relativity, were detected on September 14, 2015. Gravitational waves carry energy as gravitational radiation, which is a form of radiant energy similar to electromagnetic radiation. Their discovery capped a 50-year search.

The prize will be shared among the founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team and 1,012 other physicists and engineers. The three founders of LIGO -- Prof. Rainer Weiss, Dr. Kip Thorne and Prof. Ronald Drever -- will share $1 million.

These physicists have devoted their careers to the discovery of gravitational waves, which are ripples in the curvature of spacetime that propagate as waves. LIGO is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect gravitational waves. It operates two gravitational wave observatories: the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana and the LIGO Hanford Observatory in Washington.

The remaining $2 million will be shared equally among the 1,012 other members the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration teams. This mean each person will get some $2000.

Sharing the credit and the prize money is "much more modern and much more the way that physics gets done," said Weiss. "You can't credit just the three of us for this."

The famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said the discovery of gravitational waves has huge significance. He said it was evidence for general relativity and its predictions of black hole interactions.

The discovery of gravitational waves is also "the beginning of a new astronomy that will reveal the universe through a different medium." Hawking won the Special Breakthrough Prize in 2013.

The discovery should help astronomers determine the number of black holes and neutron stars in the Universe. It might also provide insights into how galaxies are formed.

The Breakthrough Prizes for scientific achievements was created by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and like-minded partners, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

TagsSpecial Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, Prof. Rainer Weiss, Dr. Kip Thorne and Prof. Ronald Drever, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking