Weekly Space Hangout: November 17, 2021 — Merger-Triggered Core-Collapse Supernovae w/Dillon Dong, CalTech

Weekly Space Hangout

This week we are excited to welcome CalTech graduate student Dillon Dong to the WSH. Dillon was the lead investigator in a study that determined that a bright radio flare discovered in data collected by the Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey in 2017 was the result of a black hole or neutron star crashing into its companion star in a never-before-seen process.

You can learn more about this study and its surprising results here: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/a-black-hole-triggers-a-premature-supernova

Dillon Dong is a final year graduate student working on finding and characterizing astronomical sources that appear and disappear on human timescales. For his Ph.D thesis, he cataloged 1.5 million radio sources in the largest high-resolution radio sky survey to date: the Very Large Array Sky Survey. By looking for sources that were not detected (but should have been) in historical observations, he discovered >1000 sources that have newly appeared in the radio sky. One of these sources was a never-before-seen type of supernova, caused by the merger of a black hole or neutron star with its massive star companion. This explosion was published in the journal Science, and received press coverage in 40+ countries.

You can learn more about Dillon and his research on his website: https://dillon-z-dong.github.io/

**************************************** The Weekly Space Hangout is a production of CosmoQuest. Want to support CosmoQuest? Here are some specific ways you can help:

► Subscribe FREE to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/cosmoquest

► Subscribe to our podcasts Astronomy Cast and Daily Space where ever you get your podcasts!

► Watch our streams over on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/cosmoquestx – follow and subscribe!

► Become a Patreon of CosmoQuest https://www.patreon.com/cosmoquestx

► Become a Patreon of Astronomy Cast https://www.patreon.com/astronomycast

► Buy stuff from our Redbubble https://www.redbubble.com/people/cosmoquestx

► Join our Discord server for CosmoQuest - https://discord.gg/X8rw4vv

► Join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew! - http://www.wshcrew.space/

Don't forget to like and subscribe! Plus we love being shared out to new people, so tweet, comment, review us... all the free things you can do to help bring science into people's lives.