Application deadline this week.
We are looking for a PhD student to join the New Robotic Telescope team from 1st October 2021 on a fully funded UKRI/STFC Studentship. The project will be to build on the success of the Liverpool Telescope and investigate the next generation of automated scheduling for astronomy. You will be simulating the transient sky and developing observation scheduling algorithms to ensure we optimally execute the telescope science. It is suitable for applicants with a wide range of experience, for example one of physics, astrophysics, engineering, computer science, data science or other related disciplines and we strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. You can find more details and the application procedure (deadline 14th May) at https://www.robotictelescope.org/nrt-phd-scheduling.

A virtual tour of the Liverpool Telescope site in La Palma is on this website at the Site Tour page. You can walk around the site, even into the telescope enclosure itself, and switch between day and night views. [full story]

The expanding debris shells from two separate novae that were seen to erupt decades ago have been discovered and characterised in a recent paper by Éamonn Harvey et al. The paper shows that new nova shells can be found from archive data and new limited multi-epoch followup data from small to medium-sized research telescopes. [full story]

A broad absorption band in the interstellar medium has been discovered in the optical range. This is the first time a band of this type has been found in the visible part of the spectrum. The broad interstellar band (BIB) is centered close to 7700Å with a full width at half maximum of 177Å. It is significantly wider than the numerous diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) in the optical range that have widths of a few tens of angstroms at most. Full details are in the paper at Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a press release is here. [full story]

Astronomers have detected for the first time a double caustic-crossing in a microlensed quasar. The collaborative project, between research teams in Russia, Spain, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, used the Liverpool Telescope and the 1.5m telescope at the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan to conduct a 14-year monitoring campaign (2006-2019) of the gravitationally-lensed quasar known as the "Einstein Cross". [full story]

Recent images taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft of nearby stars Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri show obvious parallax much greater than observed from Earth orbit. Astronomers around the world were encouraged to image the stars at the same time as New Horizons and compare them to provide a first-ever demonstration of large and "pure" stellar parallaxes. [full story]

A new general purpose Python module for submitting observations to The Liverpool Telescope has been developed by Astrophysics Research Institute PhD student Kyle Medler. With this module, users can now submit observations to the telescope from automated Python scripts. This is an alternative to using ithe fully featured PhaseII user interface, and is suitable for the most common observation modes. [full story]

Last month the spacecraft BepiColombo swung by Earth on its way to the planet Mercury. The LT was approached by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), who provided several instruments for the mission, to observe BepiColombo while it was in the vicinity of the Earth. [full story]

Swift J1357.2-0933 is a black hole X-ray binary which shows transient behaviour, alternating long periods of quiescence with short (weeks long) and violent outbursts. These episodes are triggered by a sudden increase of mass accretion onto the black hole. The system was observed to go into outburst in 2017: the first such event since the outburst which led to its discovery in 2011. In a paper published recently in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jimenez-Ibarra et al. report high time resolution follow-up of the 2017 outburst. [full story]

New Exposure Time Calculators (ETCs) for the LT have been installed on the website at the Exposure Time Calculator page. Between the two ETCs (one for imaging, the other for spectroscopy), existing and prospective users can answer questions on what exposure times are necessary to achieve a required signal to noise ratio. Users can select any of the many instruments mounted on the LT and adjust their settings, as well as the effect of atmospheric turbulence ("seeing") and background sky brightness. [full story]

Liverpool John Moores University astrophysicists and the Liverpool Telescope contributed to a study published in Nature recently of a gamma-ray burst caused by the collapse of a massive star 5 billion light years away. Analysis of the minutes immediately after the burst reveals emission of photons a trillion times more energetic than visible light. “These are the highest energy photons ever seen from a gamma-ray burst,” stated Dr Daniel Perley, a senior lecturer at LJMU's Astrophysics Research Institute involved with the study. [full story]