Rapid astrophysical explosions from neutron star and black hole interactions

Background

Robotic wide-field telescopes now repeatedly image the sky to find explosive and variable phenomena. As surveys improve, we are beginning to discover fast-evolving explosions that were previously impossible to detect. Many of the fastest such "transients" involve energetic interactions between compact stellar remnants: black holes and neutron stars. New classes of transients discovered in the last few years include kilonovae, which are collisions between neutron stars producing gravitational waves and light, and extremely luminous fast transients that may result from the disruption of normal stars by stellar- or intermediate-mass black holes. Finding more of these rare events in data from new all-sky surveys will help to understand the physics of these energetic interactions, the behaviour of matter in extreme gravitational environments, and the generation of new chemical elements.

The project

The transients research group at QUB are involved in several major sky surveys seeking to detect fast-evolving explosions and compact object mergers, including the new Vera Rubin Observatory that will conduct the largest ever transient survey. We operate the ATLAS and Pan-STARRS transients searches, and trigger follow-up observations of gravitational waves to search for kilonovae. We also lead the extreme transients working group for the new SoXS spectrograph, with guaranteed telescope time to observe luminous fast transients. There are different possibilities for the project depending on the experience and interests of the student. For example, one option is to build a new code to inject kilonova models into ATLAS data, determining our detection efficiency and the underlying luminosity distribution of kilonovae. An alternative is to investigate the unknown nature of luminous fast transients by devising a search algorithm for new candidates and obtaining spectroscopic follow-up observations with SoXS.

More information

Supervisor: Dr Matt Nicholl (matt.nicholl@qub.ac.uk)