Brand-New Supernova Spotted Within Hours, Will Be the Most-Studied Star Explosion Ever

New Supernova Type Ia supernova PTF 11kly, 
the youngest ever detected, is seen above over 
three successive nights. The left image, taken Aug. 22, 
shows the event before it exploded supernova, 
approximately 1 million times fainter than the human 
eye can detect. The center image, from Aug. 23, 
shows the supernova at about 10,000 times fainter 
than the human eye can detect. The right image, from 
Aug. 24, shows that the event is 6 times brighter 
than the previous day.  Lawrence Berkeley National 
Laboratory

PopSci - Astronomers just spotted a brand-new supernova mere hours after it exploded, thanks to a robotic telescope and some smart computer algorithms. Now they’re scrambling to use as many telescopes as possible, on Earth and in space, to observe the star’s death throes.

New supernovae are not terribly rare, but this one is unique because it is so close — 21 million light years away — and it’s of a type that is crucial to astronomical measurements. The supernova, PTF 11kly, is the youngest ever detected.

It showed up in the spiral galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, a rather large spiral (10 times the size of the Milky Way) located in the constellation Ursa Major, known to its friends as the Big Dipper. It’s a Type Ia supernova, a very bright type that is used for gauging distances among galaxies. The use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles helped astronomers prove how rapidly the universe is expanding, and led to the discovery of dark energy. So it’s an important type, and the discovery of a super-new, superclose supernova is tantalizing news for astronomers.

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which is designed to observe and discover astronomical events as they happen, spotted the supernova earlier this week, according to a news release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. First, a robotic observation system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory scans the sky, and feeds data to a supercomputer at Berkeley Lab. The computers use machine learning algorithms to comb through the PTF data and flag interesting astronomical phenomena. Within a couple hours of spotting PTF 11kly, the system sent its coordinates to telescopes around the world so others could check it out, according to LBL.                 More