Follow us on Twitter Spacedotcom and on Facebook. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul and /PaulMattSutter. Learn more by listening to the episode 'What's so groovy about gravitational waves? (Part 2)' on the 'Ask A Spaceman' podcast, available on iTunes and. No wonder a third of astronomers worldwide found it interesting. That single measurement was a billion times more precise than any previous observation, and thus wiped out the vast majority of modified theories of gravity. To arrive at Earth that close to each other over such a long journey, the gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves would have had to travel at the same speed to one part in a million billion. But that was after traveling over 140 million miles (225 million kilometers). The gravitational wave signal and the gamma-ray burst signal from the kilonova arrived within 1.7 seconds of each other. With that single kilonova event, the universe gave us the perfect place to test this. How gravitational waves led astronomers to neutron star gold First glimpse of colliding neutron stars yields stunning pics In images: The amazing discovery of a neutron-star crash, gravitational waves & more But astronomers have long been trying to develop extensions and modifications to general relativity, and the vast majority of those extensions and modifications predicted different speeds for gravitational waves. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. The death of modified gravityД«ut that wasn't the only reason the kilonova observations were so fascinating. In short, the gold in your jewelry was forged from two neutron stars that collided long before the birth of the solar system. That kilonova alone produced more than 100 Earths' worth of pure, solid precious metals, confirming that these explosions are fantastic at creating heavy elements. Between gravitational waves and traditional electromagnetic observations, astronomers got a complete picture from the moment the merger began. (In comparison, supernovas occur once every few decades in each galaxy.)ДЄnd the addition of gravitational wave signals provided an unprecedented glimpse inside the event itself. Kilonovas had long been predicted, but with an occurrence rate of 1 every 100,000 years per galaxy, astronomers weren't really expecting to see one so soon. It was perhaps the most widely described astronomical event in human history, with over 100 papers on the subject appearing within the first two months. All told, about one-third of the entire astronomical community around the globe participated in the effort. Less than 2 seconds later, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst - a brief, bright flash of gamma-rays.ДЄ flurry of scientific interest followed, as astronomers around the world trained their telescopes, antennas and orbiting observatories at the kilonova event, scanning it in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. These gravitational waves were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo observatory, which immediately notified the astronomical community that they had seen the distinct ripple in space-time that could only mean that two neutron stars had collided. The event occurred about 140 million light-years from Earth and was first heralded by the appearance of a certain pattern of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, washing over Earth. In 2017, astronomers witnessed their first kilonova. Together with their cousins, supernovas, kilonovas fill out the periodic table and generate all the elements necessary to make rocky planets ready to host living organisms. With all the neutrons flying around and combining with each other, and all the energy needed to power the nuclear reactions, kilonovas are responsible for producing enormous amounts of heavy elements, including gold, silver and xenon.

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