Transcript

INSTRUCTOR:

The GAIA mission sent a satellite out to the Lagrange 2 point of the Earth-Sun system, which is beyond the moon. Now, this satellite is always observing the night sky. And over time, it builds up a pattern of how the whole sky looks. In particular, it records the brightness of each star that it looks at and sends the data down to Earth to radio telescopes. And then the data is then stored in Cambridge.

Now, this is a huge amount of data. Every single star that it can see has data points over time, which is then sifted through by the GAIA alerts team which is based in Cambridge and Warsaw. They look for anything interesting, any interesting patterns in the brightness of these stars over time to see if something interesting is happening. And then they send out the data for anything they find interesting to the general public and to people like me who might be able to do something interesting with it.

Now, what I do with PIRATE is look through these GAIA alerts for anything which I might find interesting and then have PIRATE follow it up. In particular, I'm trying to automate as much of the process as possible. So these alerts are looked through automatically and then sent to PIRATE if they're interesting.

The point where I step in is to look at these targets after they've been observed for a few nights and decide whether I want to carry on observing them or to stop observing them. If I carry on, after a short time, I try to look for patterns in the data which might determine what kind of variable this star is. In particular, I'm interested in transient events such as supernovae, which only occur once, as opposed to periodic variables, which occur over a long period of time continuously.