Since 2018 the Zwicky Transient Facility, an international astronomical collaboration based at the Palomar Observatory in California, has scanned the entire sky every two to three nights. As part of this mission, the ZTF’s Bright Transient Survey has been counting and cataloging supernovae—flashes of light in the sky that are the telltale signs of stars dying in spectacular explosions.
On Dec. 4, ZTF researchers—including astronomers at the University of Washington—announced that they have identified more than 10,000 of these stellar events, the largest number ever identified by an astronomical survey.
“There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes,” said Christoffer Fremling, an astronomer at Caltech who leads the Bright Transient Survey. “ZTF detects hundreds of these explosions per night and a handful are then confirmed as supernovae. Systematically doing this for seven years has led to the most complete record of confirmed supernovae to date.”
Leave a reply