LDAS Monthly Meeting – “A wondrous discovery” – how the mystery of the missing gold was solved by a kilonova.

Tonights talk is by Keith Tritton and it’s about gold! Come and listen and get rich too………… well, in knowledge anyway.

On 17 August 2017 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory LIGO and the Virgo Interferometer simultaneously detected a gravitational wave event. About two seconds later, the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL telescope and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope observed a short gamma-ray burst from approximately the same direction. Optical astronomers immediately started a hunt to locate the source of the event and tracked it down to a point of light in a galaxy about 130 million light-years away – the first light ever detected from a gravitational wave source. These observations eventually helped to solve a long-standing mystery: what was the astronomical origin of the heaviest chemical elements?

Members £2, non members £3. There will be refreshments and an astronomy news update.