Stellar discovery
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - 09:30
in Astronomy & Space
On August 24, astrophysicist Peter Nugent was playing a little catch-up. Nugent, an adjunct professor at Berkeley and group leader of the Computational Cosmology Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, settled in to look at data collected overnight by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). This fully automated survey based at Caltech searches for transients, a catch-all term for as yet unidentified astronomical objects that suddenly appear, change, and fade away.