Stockholm: A Japanese and two American researchers won the Nobel Prize in physics on October 8 for "pioneering contributions to astrophysics", including the detection of cosmic neutrinos and cosmic X-ray sources.

Raymond Davis, Jr, 87, of the University of Pennsylvania and Masatoshi Koshiba, 76, of the University of Tokyo will share half the prize, worth 10 million Kronor ($ 1 million), for their research into cosmic neutrinos.

Riccardo Giacconi, 71, of the Associated Universities Inc in Washington DC will get the other half for his construction of instruments needed to investigate cosmic X- ray radiation, which is absorbed in the Earth's atmosphere.

The laureates used the "very smallest components of the universe to increase our understanding of the very largest", including the Sun, stars, galaxies and supernovae, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.

This year's Nobel winners have "opened new windows to space", Mats Jonsson, chairman of the Nobel committee of physics said.

In 2001, the physics award went to three scientists for the discovery of the Bose- Einstein condensate in 1995, the coldest piece of material to date.

Americans, Eric A Cornell and Carl E Wieman and German scientist Wolfgang Ketterle created a new state of matter, an ultra cold gas that could help scientists develop smaller and faster electronics by depositing a stream of atoms on computer circuit boards.

"We are no closer to achieving the result (of fast circuit boards). It could take years," Cornell said on October 7.