We lead transient surveys on some of the world's most powerful survey telescopes.
These wide-field survey telescopes are based in Hawaii (the NASA funded ATLAS and Pan-STARRS facilities) and we follow the discoveries up with ESO spectroscopic instruments. We build radiative transfer models of exploding transients and apply them to the spectra of supernovae and transients from merging compact objects. We have a joint observation and theory project to discover kilonovae associated with gravitational wave events and model their emission with radiative transfer codes including the latest heavy element atomic data.
ARC Academics:
Prof. Stephen Smartt (University of Oxford & Queen's University Belfast)