Stephen Smart at the ESO press conference announcing discovery of a neutron star merger

Stephen Smartt, professor at the Queen's University Belfast, talks about the discovery of a new light source in NGC 4993, the electromagnetic counterpart to a neutron star merger known as a kilonova, during the ESO press conference announcing the discovery of a neutron star merger on 16 October 2017. Smartt's team, along with a number of other European teams, used ESO telescopes to collect data on the kilonova.