 It was incredibly exciting to see the data. It was almost surreal. This is a phenomena that had never been seen before. What's been discovered is the merger of two dense neutron stars. What they produced was a ripple in spacetime 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 see the entire galaxy and the Earth with all these heavy metals that we find around us. What we see from the observations is a point of light, but there's a lot of information in that light. It's the exact spectrum of colors across the rainbow, its brightness, and how it evolves over time. 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 were 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.