Observing Supernovae

Rubin Observatory monitors millions of galaxies on a regular basis and is contributing to a huge increase in the number of supernovae discovered each night. It’s your turn to examine some of these recently discovered supernovae.

Find the supernova in the images and click on it. A set of data of the apparent magnitude of the supernova taken over a series of days will appear on the graph. This is known as a light curve. Note that a smaller apparent magnitude number indicates the object appears brighter, and a larger number indicates the object appears dimmer. Use the forward arrows to advance one-by-one through the images and notice how the changes in the supernova's brightness correspond with the changes in apparent magnitude on the light curve.

Supernovae are relatively rare events. Even in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, only about one supernova occurs every 50 years. But because there are so many galaxies in the Universe, astronomers have observed over 50,000 supernovae, enough to identify patterns of how they change in brightness and classify them into different groups.