Media Advisory: Press Conference at ESO HQ Announcing Unprecedented Discovery

[JesterCS]

ESO will hold a press conference on 16 October 2017 at 16:00 CEST, at its Headquarters in Garching, Germany, to present groundbreaking observations of an astronomical phenomenon that has never been witnessed before.

http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann17071/?lang

[triron]

1. wished I had some clue!

[AJT]

2. well, as our tweeter in chief would say "you'll find out".

[Tanuki]

3. My guess is that it pertains to the asteroid

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/story/755157001/

"An asteroid the size of a house will zoom past the Earth on Thursday at a distance of some 26,000 miles, NASA said. 

That's actually fairly close, when you consider that 
the moon is about 239,000 miles away.

"It's damn close," Rolf Densing, head of the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, told The Telegraph. "The farthest satellites are 22,000 miles out, so this is indeed a close miss," he said.

There is no chance the asteroid will hit the Earth. The rock's closest approach will be over Antarctica at 1:42 a.m. ET on Thursday.".....(more)

[JesterCS]

4. Probably not as there is an information embargo, but possible n/t

[Thor_MN]

5. Saw a headline that said 30,000 feet. Story had it correct, but the person that wrote the headline

should be shot. Confusing feet with miles is a pretty big mistake. If you don't know offhand that a house sized asteroid at 30,000 feet would be a huge deal, you have no business writing science based stories.

[defacto7]

6. We've known about that one since 2012

It's not even that close for its size and it's smaller than the one that hit Russia a couple of years ago.

[getting old in mke]

8. But would that qualify

as "an astronomical phenomenon that has never been witnessed before"?

[defacto7]

7. A non-natural source of high energy pulses

that can only be produced by intelligence. Possibly engine pulses for propulsion.

200,000 light years away.

I just made that up.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. I vote for that.

[cstanleytech]

10. Mine would be the actual first ignition of a star or of a black hole swallowing one.

[Sancho]

11. This appears to be the announcement..

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1733/

ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source

ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements such as gold and platinum throughout the Universe. This discovery, published in several papers in the journal Nature and elsewhere, also provides the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of neutron stars.

For the first time ever, astronomers have observed both gravitational waves and light (electromagnetic radiation) from the same event, thanks to a global collaborative effort and the quick reactions of both ESO’s facilities and others around the world.