Vox:

On Monday, a team of thousands of LIGO scientists around the globe published an incredible finding spread throughout several papers in the journal Physical Review Letters. Not only did these scientists detect, for the first time, the gravitational waves produced from two colliding neutron stars, but they were able to pinpoint their location in the sky and witness the event with optical and electromagnetic telescopes.

The gravitational waves tell physicists how large and how far away the objects are, and allow scientists to recreate the moments before they collided. Then the observations in optical light and electromagnetic waves fill in the blanks that gravitational waves can’t answer. They help astronomers nail down exactly what the objects were made out of, and which elements their collisions produced. In this case, the scientists were able to conclude that the resulting explosion from a neutron star merger produces heavy elements like gold, platinum, and uranium (which has been previously theorized but not confirmed by direct observation).

These scientists were able to witness, directly, the alchemy of the universe in action.

This is such a cool, amazing discovery. We’ve always known everything was created from stars but the knowledge your gold jewelry was probably created in the aftermath of a kilonova is mindboggling.