Description
Talks for transient science from ground-based observatories.
GUSTO (Galactic/Extragalactic Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory) is a NASA Mission of Opportunity balloon mission which successfully flew for 55 days in early 2024 high over Antarctica. GUSTO carried out fully sampled large-area observations of two key fine structure lines - [NII] 3P1-3P0 and [CII] 2P3/2-2P1/2 over a 62 square degree area of the galactic plane with a velocity resolution...
The Great Eruption (GE) of Eta Car in the mid-1800s was a spectacular astronomical event, visible to the naked eye (Smith & Frew 2011). It’s the proto-type of eruptive mass loss, luminous blue variables, and supernova impostors. Prior to the discovery of light echoes, the only observations of Eta Car's historical eruption were visual estimates of its brightness and approximate colors. Light...
The Deeper, Wider, Faster (DWF) program has grown to coordinate over 100 telescopes located on every continent and in space operating at all wavelengths (radio, mm, IRm optical, UV, X-ray and gamma-ray) and includes particle detectors (and gravitational waves, when operating) to search for and study fast transients (those with millisecond-to-day durations). DWF was developed in 2014 and was...
We are living through parallel revolutions in time-domain astrophysics and artificial intelligence. Within a year of beginning operations, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will find more transient sources than all previous surveys combined. We will be able to use these cosmic lighthouses as beacons to map how stellar populations evolve with redshift, how feedback from their deaths impacts their...
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 10-Year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is expected to revolutionise time-domain astronomy, with a hundredfold increase in detected transients. For tidal disruption events (TDEs) in particular, this will increase the population of observed objects from ~100 to ~30,000. As TDEs are a relatively recent discovery with a small catalogue of objects, many...
The number of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is increasing, and they are having a noticeable impact on the quality of a large range of astronomical data. We use archival data from the Multi Unit Spectrographic Explorer (MUSE) to quantify the effects of satellites on the datacubes. MUSE is an integral field unit (IFU) so it captures a spectrum at every pixel in the field of view. Using the...
I will give an introduction to microlensing and describe the KMTNet survey, a high-cadence photometric survey of the Milky Way Bulge. From this survey, and over the last decade, we have detected ~ 25,000 microlensing events using our telescopes in Siding Spring, CTIO and SAAO. I will discuss observational features of the survey, what we have learned about the Galactic population of cool...
For the first time ever, it is possible to obtain well sampled light curves of fast transients, with a plethora of data provided by a range of telescopes. In particular, TESS has a uniquely fast cadence that allows us to observe transients during the rise a, and decay after peak brightness. With detailed light curves built from both high cadence and multi wavelength data, understanding the...
