Kilonova Seekers Development Team

Tom Killestein is an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. His research work builds software, databases, and deep learning classification tools for finding interesting transients in data from GOTO, and gathering follow-up data to learn what we can about how the most massive stars end their lives.

Lisa Kelsey is an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include transient phenomena, such as supernovae and kilonovae, and their relationships with the galaxies that host them. She is excited to uncover particularly unusual or rare transients in GOTO.

Emily Wickens is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. She is working with GOTO and LIGO, and is looking forward to learning more about the mergers of dense objects, such as black holes and neutron stars.

Laura Nuttall is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist at the University of Portsmouth. Her research focusses on developing techniques to characterise and mitigate noise in the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors. With GOTO, Laura is keen to see what optical counterparts we can find to any kind of gravitational waves that are detected.

Joe Lyman is an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick. He wrote the software to calibrate and analyse GOTO images, and wants to use GOTO to find kilonovae and other peculiar transients linked to the deaths of massive stars.

Coleman Krawczyk is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the University of Portsmouth, and is an expert in the development and data analysis of Zooniverse citizen science projects.

The GOTO Collaboration

GOTO is an international research team built through the collaboration of scientists from across the world. We are grateful for the support and enthusiasm of the wider GOTO collaboration for the Kilonova Seekers citizen science project, and for the help of GOTO researchers with the Talk forum and media releases.

To see the full GOTO team, please visit our collaboration website.

Kilonova Seekers Moderators

SAlexandrov: Svetoslav Alexandrov has a PhD degree in Plant Physiology and currently works in the Institute of Plant Physiology and Genetics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He is also a space enthusiast, blogger and author of popular science articles. Svetoslav has participated in different citizen science projects since 2019 and they help him to expand his knowledge in areas outside his primary scientific interest.

Marcossilva: Cledison Marcos da Silva has a degree in Physics and Pedagogy, postgraduate degree in Teaching Astronomy and also in Natural Sciences. His studies are related to young and cataclysmic stars. He performs CCD photometry and visual observations for AAVSO and contributes to international research and campaigns related to these stars. He is also involved in other Zooniverse projects such as Disk Detective, Black Hole Hunters and Planet Hunters TESS, among others. He is a collaborator on the Hunting Outbursting Young Stars project that observes star formation regions with the aim of studying their members and possible members and also on NASA's Exoplanet Watch creating light curves of already known exoplanets, thus contributing to the study of the properties of these worlds outside of the Solar System.

The Kilonova Seekers Translators

GOTO
Felipe Jiménez-Ibarra, Rubina Kotak, Amit Kumar, Hanin Kuncarayakti, Danny Steeghs, Krzysztof Ulaczyk, Klaas Wiersema

Kilonova Seekers volunteers
Cledison Marcos da Silva
Barbalbero
Louis Verhaeghe
inosenpai
Sanchita Sarkar
Rudra Protap Nandi
H. A. Güler
Jiashuo Zhang

As an international research team, it is important to us to be able to provide this citizen science project in the various different languages that are spoken by our GOTO researchers, and reach as many people as possible. Our translators are working hard to translate all of the Kilonova Seekers pages, and our regular updates. We couldn’t do this without their hard work and dedication!

Acknowledgements

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) project acknowledges the support of the Monash-Warwick Alliance; University of Warwick; Monash University; University of Sheffield; University of Leicester; Armagh Observatory & Planetarium; the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT); Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC); University of Portsmouth; University of Turku; University of Birmingham; and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, grant numbers ST/T007184/1, ST/T003103/1 and ST/Z000165/1).

TK gratefully acknowledges support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, grant number ST/T506503/1), support via an Research Council of Finland grant (340613), the Turku University Foundation (Turun Yliopistosäätiö, grant no. 081810), and a Warwick Astrophysics prize post-doctoral fellowship made possible thanks to a generous philanthropic donation. LK acknowledges support for an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust through grant ECF-2024-054 and the Isaac Newton Trust through grant 24.08(w). LN and LK thank the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for support through the grant MR/T01881X/1. JL acknowledges support from a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/T020784/1).

Background images (c) Krzysztof Ulaczyk.

Survey acknowledgements

Kilonova Seekers makes use of publicly-available imaging products from DSS2, Pan-STARRS1, SDSS, Legacy Surveys, and SkyMapper, in the contextual images of our subjects.

• The Digitized Sky Survey was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W–2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. The Oschin Schmidt Telescope is operated by the California Institute of Technology and Palomar Observatory.

• The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation Grant No. AST–1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

• Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey V has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Participating Institutions. SDSS acknowledges support and resources from the Center for High-Performance Computing at the University of Utah. SDSS telescopes are located at Apache Point Observatory, funded by the Astrophysical Research Consortium and operated by New Mexico State University, and at Las Campanas Observatory, operated by the Carnegie Institution for Science. The SDSS web site is www.sdss.org. SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS Collaboration, including the Carnegie Institution for Science, Chilean National Time Allocation Committee (CNTAC) ratified researchers, Caltech, the Gotham Participation Group, Harvard University, Heidelberg University, The Flatiron Institute, The Johns Hopkins University, L’Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA Heidelberg), Max-Planck-Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), Nanjing University, National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), New Mexico State University, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Stellar Astrophysics Participation Group, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Utah, University of Virginia, Yale University, and Yunnan University.

• The Legacy Surveys consist of three individual and complementary projects: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS; Proposal ID #2014B-0404; PIs: David Schlegel and Arjun Dey), the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS; NOAO Prop. ID #2015A-0801; PIs: Zhou Xu and Xiaohui Fan), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS; Prop. ID #2016A-0453; PI: Arjun Dey). DECaLS, BASS and MzLS together include data obtained, respectively, at the Blanco telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab; the Bok telescope, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona; and the Mayall telescope, Kitt Peak National Observatory, NOIRLab. Pipeline processing and analyses of the data were supported by NOIRLab and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The Legacy Surveys project is honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. LBNL is managed by the Regents of the University of California under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy. This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, NSF’s NOIRLab, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. BASS is a key project of the Telescope Access Program (TAP), which has been funded by the National Astronomical Observatories of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (the Strategic Priority Research Program “The Emergence of Cosmological Structures” Grant # XDB09000000), and the Special Fund for Astronomy from the Ministry of Finance. The BASS is also supported by the External Cooperation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant # 114A11KYSB20160057), and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (Grant # 12120101003, # 11433005). The Legacy Survey team makes use of data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Legacy Surveys imaging of the DESI footprint is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH1123, by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract; and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to NOAO.

• The national facility capability for SkyMapper has been funded through ARC LIEF grant LE130100104 from the Australian Research Council, awarded to the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University of Technology, Monash University and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. SkyMapper is owned and operated by The Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The survey data were processed and provided by the SkyMapper Team at ANU. The SkyMapper node of the All-Sky Virtual Observatory (ASVO) is hosted at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI). Development and support of the SkyMapper node of the ASVO has been funded in part by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL) and the Australian Government through the Commonwealth's Education Investment Fund (EIF) and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), particularly the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) and the Australian National Data Service Projects (ANDS).

• This research made use of hips2fits,https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/hips-image-services/hips2fits, a service provided by CDS.