Nine scientists have won this year’s Kavli Prizes for work that detected the echoes of colliding black holes, revealed how adaptable the nervous system is, and created a technique for sculpting structures on the nanoscale.

The announcement was made on Thursday by the Norwegian Academy of Science Letters in Oslo, and was live-streamed to a watching party in New York as a part of the World Science Festival. The three prizes, each worth $1 million and split among the recipients, are awarded in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience every two years. They are named for Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-American inventor, businessman and philanthropist who started the awards in 2008 and died in 2013.

The astrophysics prize went to Rainer Weiss from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ronald W.P. Drever from the California Institute of Technology and Kip S. Thorne, also from Caltech, for directly detecting gravitational waves. While using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in September of last year, they observed wiggles in space-time that were first theorized by Albert Einstein in 1916, opening a new window on the universe.

“The real credit for this goes to the whole LIGO team,” said Dr. Thorne, who attended the viewing party in New York with Dr. Weiss. “I wouldn’t be here without the people who started it, and it would not have succeeded without this team of a thousand people who made it happen.”