 All right, your space pod for Thursday. We've got Jared on you were spreading rumors. Yeah, I was and you ended up being right Yeah, you know, it's really nice. I'm being correct about that. You know, it's even better Spreading rumors and still being correct about it. Hey, that's pretty good, right? Couple weeks ago on the show. We did a space pod about rumors coming from the laser interferometry gravitational wave observatory LIGO and Virgo possibly detecting two neutron stars colliding with each other. Well, guess what the confirmation came? Yep, they we actually detected the gravitational wave from them and The gravitational wave was detected on August 17th by LIGO in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana They have two detectors at LIGO and it was also detected by the Virgo gravitational wave detector in Europe Now it was determined that we were detecting the final seconds of two neutron stars Orbiting around each other just before they collided those neutron stars They're the cores of stars that went supernova But didn't have enough mass to create a black hole and these neutron stars They're roughly the size of a city just about 16 to 20 kilometers across and if you pulled a teaspoons worth of material out Of a neutron star. It would weigh more than Mount Everest So this this right here is a great a great use of the data by Georgia Tech Showing you the neutron stars colliding and the gravitational waves on the right side right there as they come out of the neutron stars now what was so cool about this Gravitational wave detection is that the previous ones as you see in this here from the University of Oregon Were seconds long they didn't actually last all that long. They were momentary blips In time if you will but this gravitational wave detection of the two neutron stars colliding it lasted for nearly 60 seconds this was a very long chirp involved with these gravitational waves now these two neutron stars they Collided they had different masses one was 1.6 times the mass of our Sun the other was 1.1 times the mass of our Sun and they were approximately 130 million light years away in the galaxy NGC 4883 and If we listen close enough to the video that we have right here, we should be able to hear a quick chirp from it There you go That was the chirp that we got from it So a very interesting one now unlike the previous observations of Gravitational waves the passing of these was highlighted by the detection of gamma rays from the European Space Agency's Fermi space telescope And only mere seconds after the gravitational waves were detected So someone in the comments on our rumor space pod actually asked of gravitational waves travel at the speed of light and this Detection of light two seconds after the gravitational wave tells us that they do travel at the speed of light arriving first This is yes again another proof that Einstein's theory of general relativity is correct So with LIGO and Virgo's gravitational wave detection and Fermi's gamma ray detection Scientists actually narrowed down the location almost immediately where this gravitational wave occurred Within several hours. We had over 70 ground-based telescopes and seven space-based telescopes aimed at observing NGC 4883 And this right here is the actual data from the Hubble space telescope that we saw in visible light Now the amount of data that we gathered on the single event is immense And we're literally going to be working with this data for the next few years But one of the most surprising initial findings in the data isn't just that we can now capture Optical counterparts are actual Witnessing of the event that caused the gravitational wave It's it isn't that we finally seen two neutron stars colliding directly in an event that we call a kilonova Which we've we've seen before back in 2013 What astounded us is that we saw the generation of heavy elements that we find here in the universe This is not a cherry on top for the observation This is like if you ordered a regular hot fudge sundae and you got like six massive banana splits to come with it as well It's not that we didn't understand the mechanisms that generate heavy elements in our universe It's just that we've never really seen the process which is called nucleosynthesis Synthesis occur directly for our instrumentation most of the time that occurs in the core of a star or the dead remnants of a supernova We've never actually seen the initial event that kicks that off And in fact this event these two neutron stars colliding made 16,000 times the mass of the earth in heavy elements including Golden platinum to the tune of ten times the mass of the earth So now we have an and now we have an answer to this two neutron stars colliding do generate heavy elements This is something that was predicted in studies that were released about five years ago And now we have the confirmation that our studies were correct So an incredible amount of data was was gotten not just with gravitational waves Not just with optical counterparts, but also with the formation of the heavy elements that we see in the universe So fascinating that we got all of this out of one event happening So live chat room has some comments. Sure. So green Jim says you need a bloody strong teaspoon then if you're gonna pull it out With the weight of Mount Everest on it. Yeah, that would be this less of a question more of a comment But from YouTube what you get a black hole if too heavy enough neutron stars collided actually yes You should be able to but those neutron stars need to have masses in double digits that of our Sun So, yeah, you actually could get a black hole if two neutron stars collided with each other And also if you have a star that's about eight times more massive than the Sun It's gonna end up making a black hole So so a neutron star is basically a star that was not massive enough to make a black hole But still massive enough to make a supernova and that's basically the leftovers from the supernova. So awesome So there were two very high mass stars that had supernovas and the dead cores of those stars Eventually found their ways to each other and gravitationally spiraled in on each other and collided and that's what we saw I'm also very sad that this shot is ever so slightly too tight that you can't see your shoes lift your feet up Your shoes are amazing You've got like the universe on your shoes. Yeah, well, you know, it's it's a lifestyle Decided to do astronomy. So thank you Jared. That was absolutely fantastic If you like these space pods as well as our live shows Don't forget to like and subscribe hit all of the buttons on YouTube now You need to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon It all really helps us every subscriber helps tell your family tell your friends get people watching this show That would help us a great deal and this last week on orbit 1039 We talked to John Amable about how we can colonize the solar system in our lifetime. So check that out It's really really cool