It was a good day for Einstein when an international collaboration of physicists announced in February that they detected ripples in space time known as gravitational waves from the collision of two gigantic black holes far far away. Neither gravitational waves nor black holes — both predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity — had been seen directly before.

It was also a good day for the researchers, for whom great honors were immediately predicted. Now those predictions are coming true. On Tuesday, Yuri Milner, a Russian Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist, announced that he was giving $3 million to the gravitational-wave discoverers. The award is a special addition to the $3 million Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics he awards every fall.

The three ringleaders of the gravitational-wave experiment, known as LIGO, Ronald P. Drever and Kip. S. Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, and Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will split $1 million. The other $2 million will be split among 1,012 scientists who were authors of the article in Physical Review Letters, or who made major contributions to the study of gravitational waves.