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Comment by knice | Hacker News Reader

A team from UC Santa Cruz used the data from the Swope telescope in Chile to locate the source of the gravitation waves and observe the light from the event. The data provides evidence of how gold and other heavy elements formed in the universe.

http://reports.news.ucsc.edu/neutron-star-merger/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5EkI5qbYYc

Full disclosure: I work at UC Santa Cruz and built the site linked above. :-)

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Sidenote: Amazing how international the collaboration in this industry is. Kudos to you people

Smart people have a tendency to cooperation and collaboration.

That's a nice feel-good position to express, but is there any empirical evidence for it? There are plenty of very smart people (in academia) who are narcissistic, paranoid of potential rivals, and generally the opposite of cooperative and collaborative.

It might be more of a question of field. Based on my hopelessly incomplete view from the outside, in cosmology and closely-related subjects, it's impossible to work independently and accomplish much of anything. You need observations from many different sources.

Narcissistic, paranoid are not traits what I call smart people. Humility on the other hand is. I guess studying and observing the universe makes people humble. The great physicians Einstein, Bohr and co of the beginning of 20 century worked together a lot for example. But anyway according the first fundamental of human stupidity there is fixed ratio of stupid poeple in any group of people. I think we can agree those you are referring to can be called stupid.

It's a relief to see that raw IQ is no longer the widely accepted standard for "smart".

There is an indian saying which translates to... A tree full of fruits stays closer to the ground than one without.

May not be admirable qualities, but they are often qualities of genius. The paranoia of Goedel was about as debilitating as it comes. And if you read a good Einstein biography, I think you'll discover more about him than you were expecting.

Um. I'm not so sure history is on your side with that statement. If fact, it feels like history would argue the exact opposite.

It's a field in which international collaboration is forced - no amount of intelligence or money will let a nothern-hemisphere observatory get a shot of southern-hemisphere stars, for example.

Congrats!

How do you automate screening the sky?

Do you have robots that map stars, diff the images, and send an email when the diff has a new spot of light?

How frequently does the sky get fully screened? Could there be events fast enough that we don't detect them?

Apologies, I'm not one of the researchers involved in the discovery. I'm just the web developer who built the announcement site for UCSC. Ryan Foley will participate in a Reddit AMA tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/17). I imagine your questions might get answered there.

Not involved in this, I'm guessing this is how it goes: there are algorithms that automatically register the image that was just taken, diff it with a reference image of the sky from before, and if there's a significant difference that passes some false positive tests, then there's some notification for human intervention.

Indeed there could be events we are missing right now. Astronomers are building instruments that have larger fields of view (e.g., LSST), so that they can scan the sky ever few days.

This paper by one of the team members has more detail about the process used to narrow down the search field to a list of galaxies and identify possible locations of the event:

[edit]: link to the exact paragraph that discusses the method http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/13/scien...

isn't it generally accepted that gold and other heavy elements are formed in supernovae?

Yes, but we observe more gold and other heavy elements than can be attributed to supernovae alone. Events like neutron star mergers might help explain where the rest comes from.

is that really significant? There are about 10 supernovas in the universe per second; neutron star mergers must to be at least 2 orders of magnitude rarer, estimating based on the percentage of stars that wind up becoming neutron stars

Go Slugs!

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