WHAT HAPPENED WHEN NEUTRON STARS COLLIDED?
Two ultra-dense stars spiralled toward each other, colliding and collapsing into a black hole.
The "titanic" collision about 130 million light-years away created a flash brighter than a billion suns.
It was detected on August 17 prompting a frantic burst of scientific research that was kept under wraps for eight weeks.
The collision was detected within 1.7 seconds of the merger, gamma rays were emitted from the event and were picked up.
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Australian researchers played a major role: from constructing the detecting devices to the rapid response of astronomical teams that were among the first to identify the optical and radio signals from the collision in galaxy NGC 4993.
WHAT IS A NEUTRON STAR?
It's a burned-out core of a star that was once giant but exploded long ago.
Each neutron star was around 19km in diameter and contained a mass half a million times Earth.
WHY IS THE DISCOVERY SO HUGE?
The discovery has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of how elements are formed.
It's the first time gravitational waves have been detected from a new source - the collision of neutron stars - as they were previously detected from merging of black holes.
This new field of gravitational wave astronomy could result in more sightings of neutron star collisions and other phenomena.
WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?
Gravitational waves were discovered in 2015 and two weeks ago the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the three leading scientists behind an international project which first detected the tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time.
Einstein predicted gravitational waves over a century ago - he believed if you had two stars orbiting each other they would give off an intense burst just ahead of colliding.
GOLD IN THE UNIVERSE
The origin of gold has been a puzzle for decades. From the 1920s scientists knew stars acted like chemical factories - building nearly everything on the chemists periodic table - but they didn't know how.
Scientists didn't know how elements with a higher atomic weight - like gold and silver - were created.
But Monash University's Dr Eric Thrane says scientists were able to observe "a glow of ejected matter" from the collision of the neutron stars and large amounts of gold were emitted.
"It's amazing to think that that newly minted gold wedding band may have been contained in a neutron star collision," he said.
