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.
An international team of astrophysicists have uncovered an enormous bubble currently being "blown" by the regular eruptions from a binary star system within the Andromeda Galaxy.
As reported in this week's Nature, recent observations with the Liverpool Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, supported by spectroscopy from the Gran Telescopio Canarias, and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (some of the largest astronomy facilities on Earth) discovered this enormous shell-like nebula surrounding ‘M31N 2008-12a’, a recurrent novae located in our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy. At almost 400 lightyears across and still growing, this shell is far bigger than a typical nova remnant (usually around a lightyear in size) and even larger than most supernova remnants. [full story]
The Liverpool Telescope contributed to the multiwavelength follow-up campaign of the blazar TXS 0506+056, published last month in Science (IceCube Collaboration, Science, 2018, 361, 1378: arXiv:1807.08816). The campaign was prompted by the detection on 22 September 2017 of a neutrino with an energy of ~290 tera electron volts, by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. The observatory consists of thousands of sensors buried in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, designed to detect the Cherenkov radiation from charged particles. [full story]
Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) Astrophysics Research Institute (ARI) recently hosted a 3-week Newton Fund collaboration workshop with the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT). Both LJMU and NARIT own and operate their own 2-m class telescopes, and have developed a common interest in exploiting new technologies for data management and archiving, both for their existing telescopes and the proposed new 4 metre robotic telescope project on which they are collaborating. [full story]
On 18-19 January the Astrophysics Research Institute hosted LJMU's partners and prospective partners in the 4.0m New Robotic Telescope (NRT) project for a two-day workshop in Liverpool. LJMU staff were joined by representatives from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, and by videolink the National Astronomical Observatory of China. The workshop focussed on the new science the telescope will enable and the new technologies needed to build the telescope, and discussed the building and formalising of the funding consortium. [full story]
