The Liverpool Telescope is a 2.0 metre unmanned fully robotic telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos on the Canary island of La Palma. It is owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University, with financial support from STFC.
The opening being filmed for Spanish TV news.
1400 BST 15th May 2012
A new addition to the LT observatory site has recently been completed and officially opened by the Vice Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University, Professor Nigel Weatherill, in an inauguration ceremony held on 3rd May 2012. The Support Building is a multi-purpose structure comprising a workshop, storage and office/research facilities. [more]
Simulation of black hole flare. Credit: NASA, S. Gezari (John Hopkins University), and J. Guillochon (UC Santa Cruz)
1600 BST 2nd May 2012
The Liverpool Telescope (LT) was one of the telescopes that gave British astronomers a direct grandstand view of a black hole eating a star and scattering the leftovers into space. Using a slew of ground- and space-based telescopes including the LT, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. Her team’s results will appear in the May 3 online edition of the journal Nature. The LT data "showed that the object stayed very blue even as it faded, thus showing that it was not a supernova, as they cool down with time," said Andy Lawrence, team member from the University of Edinburgh. [more]
1530 GMT 12th January 2012
A long-term photometric monitoring study by the LT was recently used to unveil the nature of the accretion flow and jet connection of a distant active galactic nucleus (AGN) for the first time.
AGNs generate spectacular X-ray, ultraviolet (UV) and optical continuum luminosities by matter accretion onto their central rotating supermassive black holes. However, the precise geometry and origin of this huge energy production is still largely unknown, and direct spatial resolution of the emitting regions from such objects is not currently possible. Fortunately, there is a time-domain technique to probe the accretion physics for AGNs. This is the so-called "continuum reverberation" (or echo) mapping, which relies on the analysis of time-delayed responses of different continuum emitting regions to original fluctuations in a driving source. [more]
Artist's impression of thermal GRB. Credit: A. Simonnet, NASA
1800 GMT 30th November 2011
The Liverpool Telescope (LT) recently played an important role in the discovery of a new type of gamma-ray burst, as revealed in a new paper published in Nature this week (Thöne et al, Nature, 480, 72-74, 2011).
On Christmas Day 2010 a peculiar GRB occurred, designated GRB101225A (after the date of its discovery), also nicknamed “The Christmas Burst”. It lasted more than half an hour, much longer than most GRBs detected so far. Its low‑energy emission (i.e. all radiation measured below the gamma-ray regime) was dominated by a strong thermal component ‑ a classical black-body spectrum ‑ while all other GRBs are dominated by synchrotron radiation. [more]
