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 images on the left, and click on it. You will now see a set of data of the apparent magnitude of the supernova taken over a series of days on the graph at the right. This is known as a light curve. Advance through all of the images of the supernova and watch as the corresponding brightness of the supernova in the image matches a circled data point on the graph.

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.

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