In the Nature article a team of international scientists describes the early discovery of the type Ia Supernova iPTF14atg. The main author of the paper is PhD student Yi Cao at California Technical University, USA. Yi Cao and his colleagues mobilized both ground- and space-based telescopes, including NASA's ultraviolet light observing Swift satellite, to take a closer look at the young supernova.
"My colleagues and I spent many sleepless nights on designing our system to search for luminous ultraviolet emission from baby Type Ia supernovae," says Yi Cao. "As you can imagine, I was fired up when I first saw a bright spot at the location of this supernova in the ultraviolet image. I knew this was likely what we had been hoping for."
“We also got early optical observations with our Nordic Optical Telescope at La Palma. Speed is very important, if one doesn’t observe them fast enough one can simply miss out on the information”, says Jesper Sollerman, professor at the Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University.
Type Ia supernovae, one of the most dazzling phenomena in the universe, are produced when small dense stars called white dwarfs explode with ferocious intensity. They were used to measure the accelerated rate of expansion of the Universe, awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. Although thousands of supernovae of this kind were found in the last decades, the process by which a white dwarf becomes one has been unclear.
“This is the bad conscious of supernova cosmology”, says Ariel Goobar, director at The Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University and one of the co-authors of the paper. “But these kind of observations help us come closer to the nature of these thermonuclear supernovae.”
“Observations of exploding stars have really led to several breakthroughs the past few years, adds Jesper Sollerman. With our new ZTF programme, funded with help from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, I am convinced we will soon have several more of these”.
The participating scientists from Stockholm University are Joel Johansson, Rahman Amanullah, Ariel Goobar, Francesco Taddia and Jesper Sollerman.
The iPTF project is a scientific collaboration between Caltech; Los Alamos National Laboratory; the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; the Oskar Klein Centre in Sweden; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan; and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan.
For further information
The paper in Nature: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14440