GLASGOW University has paid tribute to the work of one of its former scientists after three of his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Professor Ron Drever, who died in March this year, helped to lay the foundations of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) which helped lead to the detection of gravitational waves.

Mr Drever, who had dementia, passed away less than 18 months after his colleagues announced the successful search for elusive ripples in space-time.

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The historic announcement in February 2016 that tremors in the very fabric of reality had been traced to the titanic collision of two black holes was widely tipped to be a Nobel Prize winner.

Two huge L-shaped detectors in the US that together comprise Ligo measured the infinitesimally small echo of the black holes crashing together and merging 1.3 billion light years away.

Not only did the discovery, made in September 2015, confirm a prediction made by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, it also opened up a new window on the universe that promised to change astronomy and physics for ever.

The three Nobel Laureates, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, were Ligo pioneers whose work over four decades led to gravitational waves finally being observed.

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Professor Weiss, a retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, was awarded half of the nine million Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize money. Theoretical physicist Professor Thorne, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Professor Barish, a former Caltech particle physicist, also now retired, shared the rest of the prize.

The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences read: "For decisive contributions to the Ligo detector and the observation of gravitational waves."

While Mr Drever's contribution will be long remembered, the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

Mr Drever began his scientific career at the University of Glasgow before moving to the US to work on gravitational wave detection at Caltech.

A total of 11 UK universities were involved in Ligo, and the project's detectors are largely based on British-designed technology.

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Professor Sheila Rowan, director of the University of Glasgow's Institute for Gravitational Research, a leading British Ligo scientist, said: "We're thrilled to hear that the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 has gone to gravitational wave detection.

"The discovery of the existence of gravitational waves, just over two years ago, has opened up a whole new way to understand the universe.

"Some of the first steps on the road to this new field of gravitational wave astronomy were taken here in Glasgow by Professor Ron Drever and Professor Jim Hough and we're proud of having built on that work to evolve into the Institute as we are today."

Gravitational waves are generated by the most violent events in the universe, spreading outwards at the speed of light like ripples from a stone thrown in a pond.

Any object they pass through expands and contracts by a minute degree as space vibrates.

Spotting the phenomenon requires measuring this tiny movement, which covers a distance 1,000 times smaller than the width of a proton, the nuclear heart of an atom.

In the mid-1970s, Prof Weiss came up with a gravitational detector design based around interfering laser beams that could overcome the enormous problem of disturbing background noise.

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Both he and Prof Thorne were convinced from early on that gravitational waves could be detected. They were at odds with Einstein, who doubted that it would ever be possible.

Prof Thorne made crucial predictions about how to recognise a gravitational wave signal.

The third winning scientist, Prof Barish, took over as Ligo's second director in 1994 at a time when the experiment was at risk of being dropped. He is largely credited with turning the project round and bringing it to completion.

Ms Rowan said: "We're in the very early, very exciting first stages of gravitational wave astronomy, a whole new way of examining the cosmos.

"It's much less likely we'd be able to probe the universe this way without the work of Weiss, Barish and Thorne."

The Ligo detectors are situated 1,865 milesapart in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington. Each arm of the "L" is a 2.5 mile long tunnel containing a system of mirrors.

Laser beams shone through the tunnels and bounced off the mirrors meet at the corner of the L, where under normal conditions their light waves cancel each other out.

But a passing gravitational wave will cause a tiny mismatch in the length of the two tunnel arms. As a result, one reflected laser beam will be slightly behind the other. Instead of cancelling each other out, they now produce a signal that can be measured.

The detection in September 2015 came as soon as Ligo had undergone a major upgrade, and even before the experiment was officially due to re-start.

From the signal, the scientists worked out that the gravitational waves were generated by two black holes 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun colliding and merging 1.3 billion light years away.

As they coalesced, they formed a new black hole of around 62 solar masses, converting roughly three sun's worth of mass into gravitational wave energy.

Since this discovery, Ligo has observed two more gravitational wave bursts caused by other black hole collisions.

A fourth detection was made together with a similar European facility, Virgo, near Pisa in Italy, that joined the international hunt for gravitational waves in August this year.