As reported by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, 1,800 new supernovae, including the 58 Type Ia supernovae located eight billion light years away, have been captured by one of the most advanced digital imaging telescopes in the world – the Subaru Telescope. This is the 8.2-meter (320 inch) flagship telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The large, optical reflecting telescope has the capacity for several cameras and spectrographs to be mounted at the device’s four focal points for observations in visible and infrared wavelengths.
As Phys.org reports, supernovae are rare events and there are not many telescopes in the world capable of capturing sharp images of distant stars. One such telescope is the Subaru. This is because the telescope can generate shape stellar images; plus, the telescope’s Hyper Suprime-Cam, an 870 mega-pixel digital camera attached at its top, is capable of capturing a very wide area of the night sky in a single shot.
A supernova is a very bright exploding star. A supernova is a transient event which takes place occurs during the final stages of massive star’s life, which culminates in one final, titanic explosion. This event triggers the sudden appearance of a “new” bright star, before slowly fading from sight over the course of months or years.
To capture the unprecedented dumber of supernovae, astronomers took repeated images from the same area of night sky across a six month period. This slow process enabled the astronomers to identify new supernovae by searching for stars that suddenly appeared brighter. The set included five so-termed ‘super luminous’ supernovae, located more than 8 billion light years away from Earth.
In terms of the advances made with the digital telescope, it took astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope ten years to discover just 50 supernovae. The information collected will assist researchers will making more a accurate assessment of the rate of expansion of the Universe
The findings are published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, in a paper titled “The Hyper Suprime-Cam SSP transient survey in COSMOS: Overview.”
