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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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