The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)

Abstract

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) is a wide-field telescope project focused on detecting optical counterparts to gravitational-wave sources. GOTO uses arrays of 40 cm unit telescopes (UTs) on a shared robotic mount, which scales to provide large fields of view in a cost-effective manner. A complete GOTO mount uses 8 unit telescopes to give an overall field of view of 40 square degrees, and can reach a depth of 20th magnitude in three minutes. The GOTO-4 prototype was inaugurated with 4 unit telescopes in 2017 on La Palma, and was upgraded to a full 8-telescope array in 2020. A second 8-UT mount will be installed on La Palma in early 2021, and another GOTO node with two more mount systems is planned for a southern site in Australia. When complete, each mount will be networked to form a robotic, dual-hemisphere observatory, which will survey the entire visible sky every few nights and enable rapid follow-up detections of transient sources.

8 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, submitted to SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2020

References in corpus (12)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• GW190425: Observation of a Compact Binary Coalescence with Total Mass $\sim 3.4M_{\odot }$
• Astrometry.net: Blind astrometric calibration of arbitrary astronomical images
• The ATLAS All-Sky Stellar Reference Catalog
• Searching for Electromagnetic Counterparts to Gravitational-wave Merger Events with the Prototype Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO-4)
• Transient-optimised real-bogus classification with Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks -- sifting the GOTO candidate stream
• pt5m - a 0.5m robotic telescope on La Palma
• Machine Learning for Transient Recognition in Difference Imaging With Minimum Sampling Effort
• A telescope control and scheduling system for the Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer
• The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO): prototype performance and prospects for transient science

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Light curve classification with recurrent neural networks for GOTO: dealing with imbalanced data
• Binary evolution pathways of Blue Large-Amplitude Pulsators
• Fundamental physics using the temporal gravitational wave background
• LION :Laser Interferometer On the mooN
• Searching For Fermi GRB Optical Counterparts With The Prototype Gravitational-Wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO)
• Mechanisms for high spin in black-hole neutron-star binaries and kilonova emission: inheritance and accretion
• LISA double white dwarf binaries as Galactic accelerometers
• GRB 241105A: A test case for GRB classification and rapid r-process nucleosynthesis channels
• Ultra Fast Astronomy: Optimized Detection of Multimessenger Transients
• Science with a large field-of-view polarization survey: The Large Array Survey Telescope Polarization Node (LAST-P)