In one of the most spectacular scientific events of the century, the recently installed LIGO gravity wave dectector recorded a major perturbation in the space-time continuum. By triangulating the source, physicists were able to point astronomers around the world and space telescopes to a region of the Milky Way galaxy, where they observed a bright light where none had been seen before, the result of the collision of two super-dense neutron stars. Spectrographic analysis was able to confirm a theory that had been widely held but never directly observed, that all elements heavier than iron required this sort of “kilonova” explosion to be formed from lighter ones.
Here’s an article on the subject from UC Berkeley: Astronomers strike cosmic gold | Berkeley News