B.J. Fulton (LCOGT), Peter Nugent (LBNL/UCB), Sedgwick Observatory and the Palomar Transient Factory

On August 24, astrophysicist Peter Nugent was playing a little catch-up. Nugent, an adjunct professor at Berkeley and group leader of the Computational Cosmology Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, settled in to look at data collected overnight by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). This fully automated survey based at Caltech searches for transients, a catch-all term for as yet unidentified astronomical objects that suddenly appear, change, and fade away.

Computer upgrades had put the nightly analyses behind schedule, so Nugent, who heads up real-time detection for PTF, was getting them back on track. PTF’s computers had turned up a faint spot in the Pinwheel Galaxy, located near the handle of the Big Dipper. Nugent didn’t think it would amount to much, but in the off chance it might be a , he reached out to his international PTF colleagues. One turned a telescope in the Canary Islands (where it was already dark) toward the spot. The confirmation that it was a Type Ia supernova shocked Nugent, who deemed it “an instant cosmic classic.”

Type Ia supernovae, formed by a stellar explosion, are sometimes called “standard candles” because they emit light at fairly uniform levels. This characteristic was key to understanding dark energy, the concept that this year earned Berkeley’s Saul Perlmutter a Nobel Prize. The Pinwheel Galaxy supernova, just 21 million light years away, is the closest Ia observed in decades. Discovering it so soon after its birth was visible to us will shed light into the physics of how and why these stars explode.

Such discoveries can be pure luck. Nugent points out that if they had observed that area of space just a few hours earlier, they might have missed the supernova entirely. But there are ways to increase the odds, and that’s where the Palomar Transient Factory comes in.

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