2023-10-16 15:40:30
Search for new supernovae in our sky. Until now, astronomers spent hours there. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours. From now on, they will be able to leave this tedious work to artificial intelligence. She has just proven herself.
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Some 2,200 hours. This is the estimated time that astronomersastronomers have spent searching for supernovae in our skies over the past six years since the commissioning of the valuable ZTF supernovasupernova hunter (Zwicky Transient Facility). But thanks to a new tool developed by an international team led by researchers from Northwestern University (United States), they should be able, in the future, to use this time for more qualitative work. Indeed, “for the first time in the world, a series of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms observed, then identified, then communicated with another telescope to finally confirm the discovery of a supernova”announce the researchers.
Artificial intelligence to search for supernovae
Part of the process was already automated, but this time astronomers trained artificial intelligence using more than 1.4 million images from nearly 16,000 sources: erupting stars, variable stars, periodic variable stars or more erupting galaxies and of course, confirmed supernovae. They named their baby BTSbot for « Bright Transient Survey Bot ». Understand, “robot for monitoring transient light events”.
At the beginning of October, BTSbot successfully passed its first test. While ZTF had detected a probable source, artificial intelligence found SN2023tyk as early as October 5. BTSbot then automatically requested the spectrum of the potential supernova from the PalomarPalomar Observatory (United States) which then sent this spectrum to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) to determine the type of supernova: either a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf (Ia), or the collapse of the core of a massive star. The automated system finally publicly shared the discovery of its first type Ia supernova with the astronomical community on October 7.
Free up time for the study of supernovae
“The beauty of it is that once everything is on and working properly, we don’t do anything anymore. We fall asleep at night, and in the morning we see that BTSbot has done its job”comments Christoffer Fremling, astronomer at Caltech, in a Northwestern University press release. Enough to free up time for researchers to analyze observations and develop, if necessary, new hypotheses to explain the origin of these cosmic explosions.
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