UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Master’s Defense

Dylan Dutton

“Skynet’s New Observing Mode: The Campaign Manager”

Gravitational-wave events detected by LIGO, Virgo, and soon KAGRA, have several possible progenitors. Of particular interest to our group are such events that are accompanied by an optical counterpart. This includes neutron star mergers and black hole-neutron star mergers. Following a successful observing campaign for GW 170817 by our partners Distance Less Than 40 Mpc (DLT40) that resulted in the only detection of an optical counterpart to date, our group learned many lessons about the gravitational-wave event follow-up process. To this end, I’ve developed a semi-autonomous algorithm for UNC’s global robotic telescope network, Skynet, that greatly improves upon and automates much of the follow-up observing procedure. I present the new observing mode for Skynet and detail how it can be used to observe not only gravitational-wave events that produce optical counterparts, but also other transient phenomena, such as GRB localizations, young supernovae, superflares, other externally identified and reported events, and eventually, sufficiently bright LSST events.