This has rocked the astronomy community world wide (well about two months in the making). After the LIGO detectors got triggered on a 1.2-1.6 Ms (solar mass) component binary merger (e.g. at the time of the trigger highly likely to be a binary neutron star), the alert was shared with associated telescopes for followup observations. About 1.7 s after the trigger the FERMI gamma ray telescope detected a GRB (due to technicalities, the LIGO alert was circulated after the GRB alert I think).
With a null detection in Virgo the sky location was reduced to about 31 deg2, and overlapped with the FERMI sky localisation. In this patch of sky there were 30 odd galaxies with the appropriate red shift (~41 Mparsec). The 1m Swope telescope detected a bright optical transient near NGC 4993, being identified as the binary neutron star merger and GRB event.
This in turn made the telescopes observe NGC 4993 and the identified transient for the following 20 odd days, with the radio telescopes still observing the after decay.
The actual discovery paper is here 'GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral',
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstrac...ett.119.161101.
Then the 3600+ authored paper 'Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger', which involved LIGO, Virgo, FERMI and ~60 telescope followup observations, start gin the true multi-messenger astronomy (unfortunately a neutrino observation is missing),
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...41-8213/aa91c9
More gravitational wave details at
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http://www.ozgrav.org/binary-neutron...discovery.html (first video/animation is cool, shows the timeline and observations)
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http://www.ligo.org/detections/GW170817.php (first video explains the 'gravity' of it all
