Discovery of a remarkable nova by citizen scientists
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.