Please find here an overview of all publications based on results from the Kilonova Seekers citizen science project, including links to the full articles. Check back occasionally to see the new publications from the project.

Journal Papers

Kilonova Seekers: the GOTO project for real-time citizen science in time domain astrophysics

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 533, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 2113-2132
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1817

Time-domain astrophysics continues to grow rapidly, with the inception of new surveys drastically increasing data volumes. Democratized, distributed approaches to training sets for machine learning classifiers are crucial to make the most of this torrent of discovery – with citizen science approaches proving effective at meeting these requirements. In this paper, we describe the creation of and the initial results from the Kilonova Seekers citizen science project, built to find transient phenomena from the GOTO telescopes in near real-time. Kilonova Seekers launched in 2023 July and received over 600 000 classifications from approximately 2000 volunteers over the course of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA O4a observing run. During this time, the project has yielded 20 discoveries, generated a ‘gold-standard’ training set of 17 682 detections for augmenting deep-learned classifiers, and measured the performance and biases of Zooniverse volunteers on real-bogus classification. This project will continue throughout the lifetime of GOTO, pushing candidates at ever-greater cadence, and directly facilitate the next-generation classification algorithms currently in development.

GOTO065054+593624: a peculiar dwarf nova identified in real time via Kilonova Seekers

Submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics
Preprint available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11524

Dwarf novae are a crucial astrophysical laboratory for probing the nature of accretion, binary mass transfer, and binary evolution – yet their diverse observational characteristics continue to challenge our theoretical understanding. We here present the discovery of, and subsequent observing campaign on GOTO065054+593624 (hereafter GOTO0650), a dwarf nova of the WZ Sge type, discovered in real-time by citizen scientists via the Kilonova Seekers citizen science project. An extensive dataset charts the photometric and spectroscopic evolution of this object, covering the first two months of its 2024 superoutburst. GOTO0650 shows a complete absence of visible emission lines during the high state, strong H and barely-detected He~II emission, and high-amplitude echo outbursts with a rapidly decreasing timescale that together do not neatly fit in with our current view of cataclysmic variables. The comprehensive dataset presented here not only underscores the uniqueness of this dwarf nova and marks it as a candidate period bouncer, but also highlights the important contribution that citizen scientists can make to the study of Galactic transients.

Astronomer’s Telegrams

4th Oct 2024 - ATel #16842 GOTO065054.49+593624.51: Discovery of a bright optical galactic transient
9th Oct 2024 - ATel #16858 NOT and LT spectra of GOTO065054.49+593624.51 confirms its Galactic nature