Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast are part of a UK-wide team of astronomers leading a project to unlock the mysteries of how stars evolve and die.

The team will collect millions of new and detailed spectral observations over the next five years, capturing light from cosmic objects in every individual colour.

Observations are carried out using the new 4-metre Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) installed on the VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, which has just obtained its first light.

Queen’s researchers are part of the Time Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES) and will work with other UK experts to analyse thousands of supernovae and other energetic events. The data will provide unique insight into exploding stars and dramatic phenomena such as stars being shredded by supermassive black holes. It will also allow the team to study their detailed chemical composition and properties.

Dr Matt Nicholl and Professor Stephen Smartt will lead the hunt for stars that have been shredded and eaten alive by medium-size black holes in galaxy centres.

Dr Nicholl says, “As a team, we are very excited to begin analysing this huge and unique data set. Having access to this kind of data for tens of thousands of exploding stars and hungry black holes gives us a real opportunity to unlock some of the mysteries around how stars evolve and die. At Queen’s, we are especially keen to find stars shredded and eaten by medium-size black holes. These have masses much larger than a star but not as big as the monster black holes in large galaxies. Finding these rare stellar feeding frenzies can tell us how massive black holes grow to the sizes we see today. TiDES is the first project that can find enough of them to do this experiment.”

Professor Smartt adds, “As astronomers, our speciality is looking for things that change in the sky. Searching for unusual explosions and black holes is like finding a needle in a galactic haystack. Now that 4MOST has obtained its first light, the hard work will begin to search through this haystack every night and see what we find. We will provide high-precision measurements of almost 1,000 supermassive black holes, 10,000 supernovae and 100,000 galaxies. If we are lucky, we may even find new kinds of stellar explosions. This will transform our understanding of how galaxies and black holes grow together and help unlock some of the mysteries of our universe.”

TiDES gives UK astronomers access to data from the US National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory through the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).