Kirill Sokolovsky

personal page

Hi, my name is Kirill Sokolovsky. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas Tech University, developing a survey of bright Galactic transients (especially classical novae) with Elias Aydi. Previously, I was with the Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working on TESS photometry of active galactic nuclei with Yue Shen, and the Physics and Astronomy Department of Michigan State University, working in the team led by Laura Chomiuk and Jay Strader on multiwavelength observations of classical novae. I've been fascinated by novae since I witnessed the discovery of GeV emission from V407 Cygni and co-discovered Nova Sagittarii 2012 #1. I've also co-discovered Nova Cassiopeiae 2020 and contributed to the detection of simultaneous GeV and optical flares in Nova Carinae 2018. Active galactic nuclei are my other major topic of interest; they were the subject of my PhD thesis. I was involved in the RadioAstron Space-VLBI mission that imaged active galaxies BL Lacerate and 3C 84 at tens-of-microarcsecond-scale resolution. I'm also the lead developer of the VaST code that identifies variable objects in a series of astronomical images.

2025-present - postdoctoral researcher at Texas Tech University
2022-2025 - postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2018-2022 - postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University
2015-2018 - postdoctoral researcher at IAASARS, National Observatory of Athens
2011-2015 - researcher at the Astro Space Center of Lebedev Physical Institute
2008-2011 - PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn
(2011 PhD in experimental physics from the University of Cologne)
2008 - Graduated from the Physics Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University

My full CV is here.

Here are some tools that I've been developing:

VaST - the variable star detection software.
Web-based period search tool - allows one to upload a lightcurve and perform a period search using Lafler & Kinman (1965, ApJS, 11, 216) and Deeming (1975, Ap&SS;, 36,137) methods.
Photon arrival time periodicity code - a C implementation of the Hm test (de Jager, Raubenheimer & Swanepoel, 1989). Useful for photon arrival time data (think faint X-ray sources) rather than lightcurve (flux vs. time) data.
The Moscow photographic plate archive image cutout service and photometry of known variable objects. A (prototype) public interface to the plate digitization project results.
The New Milky Way survey image archive. A detailed description of the survey is available here.
Online lightcurve classifier - web interface to UPSILoN, the machine learning based periodic variable star classifier developed by Dae-Won Kim & Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones.
Times of minima calculator - a simple web-based tool to calculate times of minima from light elements.
TIFF2FITS - a C program (based on CFITSIO and libtiff) which converts TIFF images to 16-bit FITS format. May be useful for processing digitized photographic plates.
OMC2ASCII - a CFITSIO-based code to convert INTEGRAL/OMC lightcurves from FITS table to ASCII table.
Online FITS-to-ASCII lightcurve converters are available for INTEGRAL/OMC and SuperWASP data. The converters are based on the OMC2ASCII code.

You can find me on Github, X/Twitter or drop me a line at kirx[at]kirx.net