In 2025, GOTO had an outstanding year, detecting and reporting 6,703 transients (~18 per day), a rise of more than 60% compared to the previous year (~4,060). Of these, GOTO was the original discoverer of 2,557, another 60% increase on last years figure of 1,543 and an average of 7 per day. 48 of these…
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We are excited to announce that Kilonova Seekers has re-launched and entered Generation 3, marking the next phase of the project and a major update to how volunteer classifications help contribute to both discovery and machine learning. For those new to the project, Kilonova Seekers is a citizen-science project that uses data from the Gravitational-wave…
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Einstein’s General theory of Relativity predicted that massive galaxies could act as a gravitational lens for objects directly `behind’ it. Depending on its exact orientation, multiple images could be seen around an arc centered on the foreground galaxy. In 1964, Sjur Refsdal suggested that supernovae could be lensed by a foreground galaxy and might be…
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In the early hours of the 14th of July 2025, GOTO-N observed the spiral galaxy NGC 7331 and detected a faint new transient source located close to its centre. This source was assigned the name GOTO25evh, and quickly recognised as a potential young supernova. As with all extragalactic transients discovered by GOTO, it was reported…
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A nova has been discovered within our galaxy which is briefly visible to the naked eye. Originally discovered on June 12th 2025 in the southern sky by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN), V462 Lupi quickly rose to brighter than 6th magnitude, making it visible to the unaided eye. Classical novae are caused…
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A paper published in the February 2025 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society details the discovery and follow-up of a peculiar supernova led by the GOTO collaboration. Read the full paper here. The dying star SN2023tsz was an uncommon type of supernova that was discovered by GOTO. Known as a type…
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New astronomical transients (ATs) are named in alphabetical order in every given year. The first event of year 2024 is called AT2024A followed by AT2024B eventually reaching AT2024aa and AT2024ab and so forth. A few decades ago there were still so few discovered events that every one had a one-letter name, but now, due to the…
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We are happy to announce that this week we marked significant milestone of discovering 1000th transient. As seen in the plot below, especially over the last year we have been making constant progress with our detection efficiency so hopefully that trend continues!
The recent powerful solar storm allowed us to register Aurora Australis even from our southern node, which is located at latitude 31S. Enjoy the video below! Can you spot Magellanic Clouds as well?
GOTO collaboration members, Kendall Ackley and Ben Godson, put together a nice story about our on-site operations for LIGO magazine. It can be found in the following PDF on page 10: https://www.ligo.org/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue23.pdf
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