This opens up a whole new dawn in physics and astrophysics.
It’s the first time we’ve been able to link the detection of gravitational waves
to the light radiation that we can see and if you detect something in light
you can see exactly which galaxy it is in.
So what we think has happened here is that
two neutron stars have merged together, they emit gravitational waves over a period of 20-30 seconds.
They eject matter and that matter is almost certainly
the source of elements in the periodic table that are heavier than iron.
For many years we’ve debated what the origin of those
elements are and the data we’ve taken with our telescopes
in the Southern Hemisphere shows that the object gave out a lot of heat radiation
and faded very rapidly and we see signatures
in the spectrum of elements heavier than iron, things like caesium and tellurium
would have produced the emission
and even elements as heavy as gold and platinum
This opens up for the first time a new way of finding new objects in the sky
and of course it shows that Einstein 100 years ago
when he predicted that  gravitational waves exist
not only have we shown that they exist
but we can actually identify the exact object that produced them.
