Our GOTO collaboration held it's latest scientific meeting in hybrid format over the last two days. We heard from the leads of our various working groups on the progress chasing supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and even more mysterious transients. I attended remotely from Spain, during a break in a 3-week cycling holiday crossing the Iberian Peninsula.

A highlight for me was the presentations by Monash PhD student Sergey Belkin, working on followups of gamma-ray bursts detected with the Fermi satellite, and Masters candidate Kangming Pu, working on a new project aimed at systematic followup of asteroids observed with GOTO. While Sergey has already had a number of successes with discoveries and detections of GRB afterglows, the asteroid work is of particular interest, as it's a relatively unexplored area for GOTO but potentially could have some exciting new science outcomes. Amongst other objects that Kangming has detected in our GOTO network observations is the remarkable interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. Hopefully much more interesting science to come!

Labels: 2025, meetings