Exploring exotic transients in modern surveys

by Charlotte Angus (Queen’s University Belfast)

Wednesday 13 Dec 2023, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6228 - Mega (22 seats) (Albano Building 3)

The advent of wide-field time-domain optical surveys has changed the landscape of transient astronomy. Not only have they dramatically increased the rate of transient discoveries, they have allowed us to unearth new, previously unheard of, transient classes. The wide variety of different survey strategies available play a pivotal role in how we can probe the physics behind these new and exotic transients. In this talk I will demonstrate how two different surveys have done this. The Dark Energy Survey (DES), using deep multi-band imaging, has significantly broadened the definition and understanding of Superluminous Supernovae (SLSNe), unveiling the nature of pre-peak bumps, while the high cadence, Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), designed to probe the earliest transient epochs, has uncovered a rapidly evolving tidal disruption event uniquely hosted by an intermediate mass black hole. These two complementary approaches allow distinct insights into the nature of some of the most extreme physical processes in the Universe, and help us to prepare for future surveys, such as LSST.

Angus_2023-12-13.mp4