Our GOTO telescope network has already discovered many new objects, but GOTO 065054+593624 was a bit special; this 8.5-mag nova outburst was discovered in real-time, first by our Kilonova Seekers volunteers. Team members Tom Killestein and Lisa Kelsey report the discovery in their paper, now accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics.

As reported in the paper, the followup observations provided extensive coverage of the "superoutburst", which exhibited typically complex behaviour for such objects; an initially declining bright phase lasting approx. 3 weeks, followed by 10(!) successive "re-flares" each lasting just a few days. Remarkably, this object may have been detected in outburst last in 1951, 73 years ago!

Accompanying the paper were press releases from Warwick, Monash (the latter also acknowledging the contribution of Monash PhD student Sergey Belkin), Portsmouth, and our other partners, and the story was picked up by BBC News, The Independent, Agenzia ANSA (Italian), Bloomberg (Bulgarian), Your Local Guardian and The Irish News.

Labels: 2025, outreach

This week I attended the second Vasto Accretion Meeting, held in lovely Vasto, Italy. Building on the success of the 2023 meeting, this year's instalment was expanded to two weeks duration, with the first week focussing on binaries. The program covered a wide range of topics and objects, across all wavelengths. A good mix IMO of review talks and new results, with a strong showing from junior researchers and students.

I gave an invited talk on thermonuclear bursts, which was followed (in the same session) by terrific presentations by Yuri Cavecchi and Amy Knight. Great discussions followed in the coffee sessions, held in the beautiful gardens of the lovely Palazzo d'Avalos, with wonderful views down to the marina and across the Adriatic.

Kudos to the organisers, particularly Simone Scaringi for not only repeating their 2023 success but raising the bar for 2025! Looking forward to future instalments of this great meeting!

Labels: 2025, meetings

My first active week (after recovering from a bad cold/flu) in NL I attended the Netherlands Astronomy Conference in lovely Berg en Dal, hosted by the Radboud Department of Astrophysics. The conference was great with lots of interesting talks, and a wonderful opportunity for a comprehensive overview of astronomy activities here. My registration payment also gave me the opportunity to join the Koninklijke Nederlandse Astronomenclub, KNA.

I gave a talk on GOTO in the (inaugural) instrumentation session, and also presented a poster on some ongoing burst work. Also a great opportunity to meet old friends and colleagues, and new.

Due to a late cancellation I also had the opportunity to give the colloquium at Radboud the following week, which covered similar ground to my NAC presentations but gave substantially more time to describe them.

Labels: 2025, meetings

I am honoured and grateful to take up the role of van der Waals Visiting Professor at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, UvA this May. The visit is a fantastic opportunity to work with long-standing collaborators as well as making new connections both in API and the Gravitation and AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam (GRAPPA) group.

Research plans include working on thermonuclear bursts, to combine modelling efforts on the burst energetics and oscillations, with a view to constraining the properties of the neutron-star hosts. Additionally, I hope to engage with those interested in multi-wavelength followups of gravitational-wave events, along similar lines to our GOTO project.

Very excited to kick off the visit shortly!

Labels: 2025, visits

Convenient scheduling and a generous host meant that I was lucky enough to attend the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics workshop on Nucleosynthesis and Evolution of Neutron Stars at Kyoto University, end of this month. The workshop featured observers, astro and nuclear theorists, and nuclear experimentalists, and was supported in part by IReNA. Was great to catch up with some colleagues' work on thermonuclear bursts, including with the remarkable NinjaSat satellite. Also lots of presentations and posters about identifying and investigating key nuclear reactions for thermonuclear bursts. I gave a talk covering X-ray binaries and focussing on new views of thermonuclear bursts, including some recent work with matching observations and numerical models.

I am extremely grateful to the organisers and also the Foundation for Promotion of Astronomy who supported my travel and local costs.

Labels: 2025, meetings

I'm about to go on leave for the holidays, but a couple of papers to note that just came out, that I had a little involvement with.

Zhi-Qiang You's paper "The birth mass function of neutron stars" addresses the problem that many of the objects we observe today have had a history of accretion that can significantly increase their mass, so it's a challenge to work backward and infer how they started. This initial mass distribution in turn encodes information about the formative supernova explosions and evolution up to that point. Zhi-Qiang's paper has now been accepted by Nature Astronomy.

Tao Fu's paper "A comprehensive study of type I (thermonuclear) bursts in the new transient SRGA J144459.2−604207" focusses on the remarkable burst behaviour of the 2024-discovered millisecond pulsar, observed with the Chinese Insight-HXMT and NASA's IXPE satellites. During a 2-week outburst this source exhibited 60 thermonuclear bursts, with remarkably consistent profiles and recurrence times. Such "clocked" bursters are key sources for comparison with numerical models. Tao's paper has now been accepted by ApJ.

Labels: 2024, papers