1. GOTO065054+593624: a peculiar dwarf nova identified in real time via Kilonova Seekers
- Author
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Killestein, T. L., Ramsay, G., Kennedy, M., Kelsey, L., Steeghs, D., Littlefair, S., Godson, B., Lyman, J., Pursiainen, M., Warwick, B., Krawczyk, C., Nuttall, L. K., Wickens, E., Alexandrov, S. D., da Silva, C. M., Leadbeater, R., Ackley, K., Dyer, M. J., Jiménez-Ibarra, F., Ulaczyk, K., Galloway, D. K., Dhillon, V. S., O'Brien, P., Noysena, K., Kotak, R., Breton, R. P., Pallé, E., Pollacco, D., Kumar, A., O'Neill, D., Butterley, T., Wilson, R., Mattila, S., Sahu, A., Starling, R., Wang, C. Y., Liu, Q., Li, A., Dai, Z., Feng, H., Yuan, W., Billington, R., Bull, A. G., Gaudenzi, S., Gonano, V., Krawczyk, H., Mazzucato, M. T., Pasqua, A., Campos, J. A. da Silva, Torres-Guerrero, M., Antonov, N. N., Bean, S. J., Boeneker, E. T., Brincat, S. M., Darlington, G. S., Dubois, F., Hambsch, F. -J., Messier, D., Oksanen, A., Poyner, G., Romanov, F. D., Sharp, I. D., Tordai, T., Vanmunster, T., and Wenzel, K.
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics ,Astrophysics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena - Abstract
Dwarf novae are a crucial astrophysical laboratory for probing the nature of accretion, binary mass transfer, and binary evolution -- yet their diverse observational characteristics continue to challenge our theoretical understanding. We here present the discovery of, and subsequent observing campaign on GOTO065054+593624 (hereafter GOTO0650), a dwarf nova of the WZ Sge type, discovered in real-time by citizen scientists via the Kilonova Seekers citizen science project. An extensive dataset charts the photometric and spectroscopic evolution of this object, covering the first two months of its 2024 superoutburst. GOTO0650 shows a complete absence of visible emission lines during the high state, strong H and barely-detected He~II emission, and high-amplitude echo outbursts with a rapidly decreasing timescale that together do not neatly fit in with our current view of cataclysmic variables. The comprehensive dataset presented here not only underscores the uniqueness of this dwarf nova and marks it as a candidate period bouncer, but also highlights the important contribution that citizen scientists can make to the study of Galactic transients., Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to A&A
- Published
- 2025