Sky survey captures key details of cosmic explosions
Wednesday, October 16, 2013 - 13:00
in Astronomy & Space
Developed to help scientists learn more about the complex nature of celestial objects, astronomical surveys have been cataloging the night sky since the beginning of the 20th century. The iPTF started searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February. Since its inception, iPTF has been extremely successful in the early discovery and rapid follow-up studies of transients, and two recent papers by iPTF astronomers describe first-time detections.