DANIEL HOLZ: To be
honest, I never thought
it would happen in my lifetime.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There are two stars--
like our sun, only much denser--
what we've seen is them
go around each other
and crash into each other.
We've seen that in gravity--
in the gravitational waves--
and then we've seen a bunch
of light come off of that
as they get ripped apart.
Based on that, we
sent out an alert.
We just scanned this
region of the sky
and tried to find the event.
We found it almost immediately.
There was this--
sort of a new star--
very bright star-- on the
sky near this nearby galaxy.
And it there was.
Combining that with the
gravitational wave data,
we get a new measurement
for the size of the universe
and how quickly the
university is expanding.
That evening, I made the plot.
There was the culmination
of all those years
right in front of me.
And it was beautiful.
You go from Einstein just
writing these equations down
100 years ago, to now, we
have this amazing detection--
this new detection in
gravitational waves.
Something that was
thought impossible
even 20 or 30 years ago--
we've now done it.
And if it had happened
three weeks later,
none of the detectors
would have been on.
We would have
missed it entirely.
It had to happen then.
I feel very lucky.
It's a gift.
Nature's-- this
is nature's gift.
