Excerpt from the UC Davis News article:

For the first time, astronomers have observed a celestial event through both conventional telescopes and gravitational waves. The collision of two super-dense neutron stars just 120 million light-years from Earth was captured by both gravity wave observatories (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory, LIGO in the U.S., and Virgo in Italy) and telescopes including the DLT40 survey based in Chile. The results are published Oct. 16 in a collection of papers in The Astrophysical Journal, Physical Review Letters, Nature and other journals.

“This opens a new field,” said Stefano Valenti, assistant professor of physics at UC Davis and a co-leader of the DLT40 observing team. “Now we can use optical data to understand observations from gravitational waves, and vice versa.”

Please see the full article on the UC Davis News website.