Search for new supernovae in our sky. So far, astronomers have spent hours there. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours. From now on, they can leave this tedious work to artificial intelligence. It has simply proven itself.
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About 2,200 hours. This is the estimated time that astronomers have spent searching for supernovae in our sky over the last six years since the valuable supernova hunter ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) was commissioned. But thanks to a new tool developed by an international team led by researchers at Northwestern University (USA), they should be able to use this time for higher quality work in the future. In fact, “for the first time ever in the world, a series of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms were observed, then identified, and then communicated with another telescope to ultimately confirm the discovery of a supernova,” the researchers announce.
Artificial intelligence to search for supernovae
Part of the process was already automated, but this time astronomers trained artificial intelligence on more than 1.4 million images from nearly 16,000 sources: erupting stars, variable stars, periodically variable stars or more erupting galaxies, and of course confirmed supernovae. They called their little BTSbot “Bright Transient Survey Bot”. Understand “Robots for Monitoring Transient Light Events”.
At the beginning of October, BTSbot successfully passed its first test. While the ZTF had discovered a likely source, artificial intelligence discovered SN2023tyk on October 5th. BTSbot then automatically requested the spectrum of the potential supernova from the PalomarPalomar Observatory (USA), which then sent this spectrum to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) to determine the type of supernova: either a white dwarf thermonuclear explosion (Ia) or the collapse of the core of a massive star. On October 7, the automated system finally publicly announced to the astronomical community the discovery of its first Type Ia supernova.
Gain time to research supernovae
“The nice thing about it is that once everything is up and running, we don’t do anything anymore. We go to sleep at night and in the morning we see that BTSbot has done its job,” commented Christoffer Fremling, an astronomer at Caltech, in a press release from Northwestern University. Enough to give researchers time to analyze observations and, if necessary, develop new hypotheses to explain the origin of these cosmic explosions.