When two neutron stars collide 130 million light-years away, the crash sends ripples through space-time that scientists can now detect on Earth. This fellowship uses the UK-led GOTO telescope network to catch the fleeting light from these cosmic collisions and from dying stars exploding as supernovae. The core problem is speed: supernovae are discovered, but by the time large telescopes are scheduled to observe them, critical information about the star’s size, mass, and chemical makeup has already been lost. This project will automate the process, triggering follow-up telescopes within minutes of discovery—with no human intervention—to capture data on timescales that have never been systematically studied. The research also tackles the “needle in a haystack” challenge of finding the visible counterpart to gravitational-wave signals, which are now detectable but remain rare and hard to locate. This is fundamental science. It will not change a manufacturing process or a medical diagnostic tomorrow. But understanding how stars forge carbon, oxygen, and iron—the elements that seed planets and life—addresses a question as old as curiosity itself. Past fundamental work on gravitational waves already transformed how we observe the Universe; this project pushes that frontier further.
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How and where did the elements of the Universe form? How do stars live and die? What happens when two of the densest objects in the Universe crash into each other? These are some of the questions that lie at the heart of the research to be undertaken by this fellowship. The fellowship exploits the UK's premier sky survey, the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), to detect new transient objects in the Universe, and undertake innovative approaches in their studying to further our understanding of the Universe. When massive stars, more than 8 times the mass of our Sun, reach the end of their lives, they collapse due to their own gravity and produce a neutron star or black-hole. During this rapid and catastrophic collapse, large amounts of chemically-enriched material is expelled into the Universe in an extremely luminous event known as a supernova. These chemically-enriched innards are essential for life as we know it, containing carbon, oxygen and iron. Through supernova explosions, these elements form the next generation of stars and planets, seeding the building blocks of life. Our understanding of supernovae is hampered, however, due to time lags between discovery of a new supernova, and scheduling large telescopes to undertake detailed observations. This fellowship will build upon a world-leading network of telescopes to overcome this. Using the UK-led GOTO telescope system to discover new supernovae, we will automatically, with no human intervention, trigger other telescopes nearby, performing detailed observations within minutes of discovery. Opening this new timescale provides vital diagnostics on the nature of the exploding stars (such as their size and mass) and the energetics and chemical makeup of the explosion itself. These are essential for us to build a complete picture of how different stars die, and how the chemical fingerprint of our Universe was formed. After massive stars die, their journey is not quite complete - recent breakthroughs in mean we can now detect stars 'beyond the grave' as their neutron star and black hole corpses violently merge. A truly landmark moment in history occurred in 2017 when the LIGO/Virgo detectors found a completely new signal from the Universe: minute ripples in space-time. These ripples were caused by two neutron-stars merging 130 million light years away and are known as gravitational-waves - their detection was the fruition of a century-old prediction by Einstein. With the ability to detect gravitational-waves, we are now 'hearing' the Universe as well as seeing it. Just as our senses combine to give us far more information than they do alone, so too does combining light we see and gravitational-waves we hear from astrophysical transients. This new era of gravitational-wave research began with the detection in 2017 of the first event discovered in both light (photons) and gravitational-waves. Named GW170817, it is now one of the most intensely studied objects in the Universe. The findings from this event are mesmerising, but it raised further questions. To make progress we must now find other events. This is not trivial however, akin to the 'needle in the haystack' problem. We must rapidly search swathes of the night sky with systems such as GOTO to find the counterpart to the gravitational-wave signal. This fellowship is at the forefront of the international effort to realise the potential of this exciting new window on the Universe.
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