By Eric Stock

NORMAL – A recently-revealed collision of two neutron stars is shedding new light on some of the mysteries of our universe, including how gold was created.

In August, a NASA telescope detected signals from the space crash after traveling 130 million light-years.

PODCAST: Listen to Scott’s interview with Willmitch on WJBC.

“It was such a violent event, that it freed up all this energy, and this energy went into the making of the heavy elements like gold,” Illinois State University planetarium director Thomas Willmitch said. “This is actually not a surprise that this process took place, but we have never seen anything like this before.”

Willmitch told WJBC’s Scott Laughlin, Albert Einstein got it right 100 years ago.

“For a century we could not detect them and that was actually predicted by Einstein,” Willmitch said. “He said this is going to be so subtle that it’s going to be impossible to measure. It was impossible to measure until two years ago.”

Willmitch likened it to finding a strand of human hair 26,000 miles away.

Eric Stock can be reached at [email protected].