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LOS ANGELES, Oct. 17-- Chinese researchers have played a significant role in opening a new era of "Multimessenger astronomy," marked by the first detection of both electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves and light in the same cosmic collision. The discovery is also the first verification of a "kilonova" explosion, confirming binary neutron star collisions as one source for the universe's heaviest elements, such as gold and uranium. THEORY PREDICTION The story goes back 60 years to the groundbreaking stellar nucleosynthesis paper published in 1957, which offered a successful model of element formation. For decades, however, no one could identify the site of the process and the source of the neutrons. In the end of the 20th century, astrophysicists were chatting about mergers of neutron stars, which eject a small fraction of matter with a subrelativistic velocity. Until 20 years ago, a young Chinese called Xin Li and the late pioneering astrophysicist Bohdan Paczynski first presented the model of mergers of neutron stars, and analytical formulae for the associated electromagnetic radiation in the highly cited paper Transient events from neutron star mergers, which was published in 1998. "Chinese researchers did a remarkable job in the wonderful discovery...Chinese researcher Li has made the first theory prediction," said Suijian Xue, professor and deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) under Chinese Academy of Sciences. | 
