A small team led by Ryan Foley, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, was the first to find the source of the gravitational waves, located in a galaxy 130 million light-years away called NGC 4993. Foley’s team captured the first images of the event with the 1-meter Swope Telescope at the Carnegie Institution’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
A new era in astronomy: First observations of merging neutron stars
![](https://www.ucobservatories.org/files/2020/12/gravitational-wave-source-uc-santa-cruz.jpg)