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Journalism of Courage
Detection of gravitational waves has been awarded major prizes in astronomy this year, namely, a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber prize, the Kavli prize and the Shaw prize. The Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was formally presented on December 4, in MountainView, California.
The $3 million award will be shared between two groups of laureates: The three founders of LIGO will each equally share $1 million, and 1,012 contributors to the experiment will each equally share $2 million.
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Nearly forty researchers from India were actively involved in the first discovery, of which nine are current members of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). Also, many of the awardees started their research career in gravitational waves at IUCAA. The IUCAA had made significant contributions to the technical aspects of the detection. Anirban Ain, Sukanta Bose, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, Sharad Gaonkar, Anuradha Gupta, Sanjit Mitra, Nikhil Mukund, Jayanti Prasad, Tarun Souradeep, Arunava Mukherjee, Archana Pai, BS Sathyaprakash are among the members of the team.
Breakthrough Prize Foundation, which has instituted the award, is backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Internet billionaire Yuri Milner, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
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