Global Relay of Telescopes (GROWTH)

The Global Relay of Telescopes Watching Things Happen (GROWTH) is an NSF-funded project to create a global network for astronomy research and education, and was awarded $4.5-million in September 2015. The PI of the project is Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech, and the project includes the entire set of partner institutions from the ZTF project, which spans 8 countries in four continents.  The project will include international undergraduate fellowships, postdoctoral fellowships, and a global undergraduate observational astronomy course linking institutions across the globe. My role is to develop some of these educational programs, such as the observational astronomy course, developing new international research internships for undergraduates, and building a network of astronomy educators that can share resources for teaching astronomy and astrophysics, especially as it relates to the ZTF theme of time-domain astronomy.

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The GROWTH network of telescopes and institutions, which spans 7 countries and three continents. The network allows for ZTF discoveries to be continuously monitored by a global relay of telescopes.

Additional information about the GROWTH program can be found at the Caltech GROWTH web site at http://growth.caltech.edu/.

The Summer Undergraduate GROWTH internships provide funding for students from our partner institutions to conduct astrophysics research outside of the US at one of our GROWTH partners – which includes research sites in Taiwan, India, Israel, Japan, Germany and Sweden. These opportunities are described in more detail at this site: http://growth.caltech.edu/internships.html#id11

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Example of GROWTH followup for merging neutron stars. The event can be observed from telescopes across the world and allow for a complete light curve of these events, enabling better astrophysical models (from the NSF PIRE proposal by Kasliwal, et al).
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Another example of GROWTH science – observations of a new supernova can include multiple epochs spaced within hours of the explosion, enabling improved modelling of the evolution of the supernova remnant (from the NSF PIRE proposal by Kasliwal, et al).

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