It was an important day for physics: The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration and a huge group of astronomical observational facilities and teams announced the discovery of a neutron-star–neutron-star binary inspiral. It has all the properties it needs to have to be the source of r-process elements, as the theorists have been telling us it would. Incredible. And a huge win for everyone involved. Lots of questions remain (for me, anyway) about the 2-s delay between GW and EM, and about the confidence with which we can say we are seeing the r process!
It was also an unusual day for me: After working a long session on the weekend, Dan Foreman-Mackey (Flatiron) and I finished our pedagogical document about MCMC sampling. I ended the day by posting it to arXiv and submitting it (although this seems insane) to a special issue of the ApJ. I don't write many first-author publications, so this was a very, very good day.
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