You can see many things in the night sky with a telescope, either through the eyepiece or with a digital sensor. There are some things you can’t see, like gravitational waves. To image those you need special telescopes. There are currently two telescopes capable of doing this, both in the United States. One key problem is that it is hard to correlate the gravitational events with the release of optical wavelength light, which is important to study the events. This has been done but only once, and it took hours after the gravitational waves were released.

A team from the University of Warwick in the U.K. and Monash University in Australia are trying to solve this problem and bring the detection time down to minutes. They are building two new pairs of telescopes on opposite sides of the world. These telescopes have the glorious backronym GOTO, meaning Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer. For why this is funny, GoTo is the generic name for systems on small commercial telescopes that automatically find things for their lay users.

Each site, one on the Canary Islands and one at Siding Spring Observatory, will have sixteen forty-centimeter telescopes capable of viewing the entire sky in a few days. The telescopes on the Canary Island site are already set up. With a new £3.2 million pound funding, the team can finally build the second telescope set up in Australia, in time for the next LIGO observations in 2023.

As always, we look forward to hearing more about these new observatories and their results.

More Information

Monash University press release

University of Warwick press release