- It was incredibly
exciting to see the data.
It was almost surreal.
This is a phenomena that
had never been seen before.
(light music)
What's been discovered
is the merger of two dense neutron stars.
What they produced was
a ripple in space/time
that was detected as gravitational waves,
as well as the light
from the radioactive
debris ejected from it,
that glows brightly for
some period of weeks.
And in that radioactive debris
we see signals of formation
of many of the heavy elements around us,
all of the gold and platinum,
and other precious metals.
From that we conclude that basically
there's enough material
produced in these events
to basically seed the
entire galaxy and the Earth
with all these heavy metals
that we find around us.
We see from the observations
is a point of light,
but there's a lot of
information in that light.
Its exact spectrum of
colors across the rainbow,
it's brightness, and how
it evolves over time.
But you can distinguish
whether you're seeing
the heaviest elements
or lighter elements,
based upon their color.
The lighter stuff looks blue,
the heavier stuff looks red.
By comparing those to the
theoretical predictions
we're actually able to infer
what the material was made of,
how much it produced,
and how fast it was actually ejected
from the neutron star merger.
These events produced
large amounts of gold,
maybe hundreds of Earth
masses worth of gold,
and even more platinum,
maybe 500 Earth masses worth of platinum.
I think without the theoretical
modeling that we had done,
we'd all be pretty mystified
as to what exactly we had seen.
But since we had made predictions
about exactly what the
color and brightness
and duration of these events
would be, we're able to
not only understand what we were seeing,
but actually decode the
material that was there.
It's exciting to think
that something that's so
far out and distant in space
is so closely connected to something
as is home in terms of
the ring on your finger
or the gold chain around your neck.
I'm sure they'll find many
more in the coming years
and in 30 years it'll be another chapter
in the textbook of astrophysics.
So it's exciting to see
the first few sentences of that chapter
being written right now.
