Today, the completion of the first network of robotic telescopes, the BOOTES Network  (Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System) with stations on five continents, has been announced.

 

With installations in Spain (two stations), New Zealand, China, Mexico, South Africa and Chile, it constitutes the most complete network of its kind and a unique and fully automated resource for combining data from instruments around the world, monitoring the sky and supporting observations from missions and satellites.

The completion of the global BOOTES robotic telescope network has a significant Irish connection. UCD researchers Dr Antonio Martin-Carrillo and Professor Lorraine Hanlon, both UCD School of Physics, have built and operated the Watcher robotic telescope at Boyden Observatory in South Africa since 2006, in collaboration with the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein. Watcher is a fully autonomous telescope for the rapid follow-up of cosmic gamma-ray bursts and other highly variable sources. 

Building on this long-term collaboration, in 2019, University College Dublin (UCD), UFS and the State Agency Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in Spain signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop a BOOTES telescope at the Boyden site. The new BOOTES-6 telescope is now located at the site alongside Watcher.  

Professor Hanlon said: “We built the Watcher robotic telescope at Boyden Observatory to chase the visible light from the brightest explosions in the universe, called gamma-ray bursts. With this new larger telescope, we will be on target faster to catch this fading light. As part of the global BOOTES telescope network, we are delighted to continue our long-standing collaboration with IAA Granada and the University of the Free State.”

Professor Hanlon is director of UCD C-Space, Centre for Space Research and the EIRSAT-1 programme, which will launch Ireland’s first satellite in 2023. The mission will gather data on gamma-ray bursts from outer space, as well as conducting other experiments.

Dr Martin-Carrillo said: “The installation of BOOTES-6 alongside UCD’s Watcher robotic telescope at Boyden gives us a great opportunity to continue and advance our research projects. Both telescopes have almost identical equipment which allow us to combine their observations easily. By having two telescopes at the same observatory we can implement more efficient ways of following up gamma-ray busts and searching for the optical counterparts of gravitational waves. Being part of the BOOTES network provides us with a unique opportunity of having full coverage of the night sky and the ability of monitoring astrophysical sources almost uninterruptedly.”

The Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucía (IAA), of the CSIC, completed the deployment of the BOOTES Network, making Spain the first country in the world to lead a global network of autonomous observatories.

Scientist at IAA-CSIC and Principal Investigator in the BOOTES Network, Professor Alberto J. Castro-Tirado said: “BOOTES is the result of almost twenty-five years of continuous effort, since we installed the first station in 1998 at INTA (Arenosillo, Huelva), the institution that initially supported the project. The complete deployment represents a scientific milestone since it is the first robotic network with a presence on all continents, ahead of the American project, whose Asian station is under construction, and the Russian one, which is lacking an installation in Oceania.”

The BOOTES network, managed by the IAA-CSIC, will quickly and autonomously observe what are known as transient sources, astrophysical objects that do not present a permanent emission over time, but rather emit light briefly, intensely and suddenly. These events are usually detected by satellite, and BOOTES will provide an automated response in real time that allows their characterization.

The network will contribute to the study of gamma-ray bursts, which are the most energetic events in the universe and are associated with the death of very massive stars. Their detection informs the scientific community of the outbreak so that the event can be studied in detail.

The existence of a network of very fast pointing robotic telescopes represents an ideal complement to satellite detection. BOOTES will also work to track and monitor neutrino sources and objects that emit gravitational waves, or even objects such as comets, asteroids, variable stars or supernovae. In addition, it will track space debris and potentially dangerous objects that may pose a threat to our planet.

 

High impact science with BOOTES

Fast-tracking observations of gamma-ray bursts with BOOTES, from the first few seconds to the final phases, have enabled narrowing models of gamma-ray bursts, and have also contributed to some high-impact results in recent years. One of the observatories of the BOOTES network observed the event known as GW170817 in 2017, the first detection of a gravitational wave electromagnetic counterpart in history.

Observing the phenomenon responsible for this emission, the merger of two neutron stars, allowed the first simultaneous study in light and gravitational waves and inaugurated a new era in astronomical observations.

In 2020, BOOTES observatories contributed to the identification of a very short duration radio burst-producing source in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which was presented in three papers in Nature. The research suggested that a magnetar, a neutron star with a very intense magnetic field, was most likely behind this phenomenon.

In 2021, BOOTES contributed to research, also published in Nature, of different pulses in the giant magnetic flare of a neutron star. In just one tenth of a second, a magnetar released an energy equivalent to that produced by the Sun in 100,000 years, and its detailed analysis revealed multiple pulses at the peak of the eruption, which shed light on these still little-known giant magnetic flares.

Professor Castro-Tirado said: “The culmination of the network is a success, since it has been possible with a human team and a much lower budget than similar projects. With four stations in the northern hemisphere and three in the southern hemisphere, there will always be at least one telescope covering the northern and southern skies, making it extremely efficient in detecting transient sources. In addition, with all the stations already operational, we can coordinate them as a single observatory that covers the entire planet, the potential of which we will show to the international community at the robotic astrophysics congress that we hold biannually and that will take place in October in Malaga.”

He concluded: “I conceived the project when I was developing my doctoral thesis in Denmark 30 years ago, and for me it is a dream come true.”

 

 

Further Reading

Y.-D. Hu et al. The Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System in the multi-messenger astronomy era. Frontiers in Astronomy (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fspas.2023.952887

A.J. Castro-Tirado et al. The Burst Observer and Optical Transient Exploring System (BOOTES). Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement 138, 583 (1998). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/aas:1999362