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Post Info TOPIC: Palomar Transient Factory
Blobrana


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An innovative sky survey has begun returning images that will be used to detect unprecedented numbers of powerful cosmic explosions - called supernovae - in distant galaxies, and variable brightness stars in our own Milky Way. The survey also may soon reveal new classes of astronomical objects.
All of these discoveries will stem from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which combines, in a new way, the power of a wide-field telescope, a high-resolution camera, and high-performance networking and computing, with rapid follow-up by telescopes around the globe, to open windows of discovery for astronomers. The survey has already found 40 supernovae and is gearing up to switch to a robotic mode of operation that will allow objects to be discovered nightly without the need for human intervention.
The Palomar Transient Factory is a collaboration of scientists and engineers from institutions around the world, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech); the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); Columbia University; Las Cumbres Observatory; the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; and Oxford University.

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Blobrana


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An innovative new sky survey, called the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), will utilise the unique tools and services offered by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to expose relatively rare and fleeting cosmic events, like supernovae and gamma ray bursts.
In fact, during the commissioning phase alone, the survey has already uncovered more than 40 supernovae, stellar explosions, and astronomers expect to discover thousands more each year. Such events occur about once a century in our own Milky Way galaxy and are visible for only a few months.

"This survey is a trail blazer in many ways - it is the first project dedicated solely to finding transient events, and as part of this mission we've worked with NERSC to develop an automated system that will sift through terabytes of astronomical data every night to find interesting events, and have secured time on some of the world's most powerful ground-based telescopes to conduct immediate follow up observations as events are identified" - Shrinivas Kulkarni, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Director of Caltech Optical Observatories. He is also principal investigator of the PTF survey.

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