August 17th 2017 will live in history as a day when an event, 130 million years in the making, shook the very foundations of our planet. In of itself, the discovery of a kilonova; the merging of two neutron stars, was something special. Predicted 30 years ago, an explosion of this magnitude had never been observed before. And yet this event could have easily been missed. Through a series of fortuitous events and advances in scientific collaboration, more than 4000 scientists from over 70 observatories and multiple research organisations were able to piece together an explosion that lasted for 9 days. The real story is the glimpse at the future of mass scientific collaboration, on a truly global scale, in near real time. Taking in research, skills and capabilities from multiple fields of study, across multiple continents, to respond to a transient event lasting only a few moments per discipline. This presentation explores the relationship between the new discoveries in astronomy, the birth of gravitational astronomy and the dawning of the age of real-time Big Science.
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