Last year, more than 3,500 enthusiasts joined the Kilonova Seekers project, which aims to process data from the GOTO telescope. Soon enough, they achieved an unprecedented result — they detected a kilonova just a few hours after it flared up.
Amateur scientists and kilonova
When the Kilonova Seekers project began, it seemed completely hopeless: amateur astronomers had to spend many days checking thousands of images of the starry sky in search of a source of radiation that had not been seen before. No one thought that something like this could work.
Nevertheless, an article was recently published in Astronomy & Astrophysics describing the amazing discovery of kilonova GOTO0650, which took place in October last year. And it was “citizen scientists” who made this discovery. Furthermore, they completed the analysis in just a few hours, setting a new record.
Kilonova is a phenomenon involving the collision and merger of two neutron stars, which results in the formation of a black hole. During this event, a large amount of energy is released, exceeding even a nova explosion.
This is a very fast-moving event. Therefore, the data received from GOTO telescopes has to be processed very quickly. Still, the researchers managed to get 3,500 volunteers to join in and let them use their own observation tools.
Achievements
Since kilonovas do not warn anyone of their emergence, they are usually detected either by gravitational waves or by analyzing images collected over weeks and months. However, when GOTO0650 flared up in October 2024, the Kilonova Seekers project participants managed to identify it in just 3.5 hours.
Meanwhile, it managed to increase its luminosity by 2,500 times during this period. That is, during this time, intense processes took place with it that had not been studied in detail before. But this time, researchers were able to conduct spectroscopy, X-ray, and ultraviolet measurements and collect extremely valuable data on this phenomenon.
With so many observations made in these image surveys, it’ll soon be impossible for individuals and small groups of scientists to evaluate and verify them. Citizen science is a viable, mutually beneficial solution to avoid missing objects such as GOTO0650.
According to phys.org
