BBC Stargazing Live and SkyMapper Discover Supernova
Our friends in the SkyMapper team, led by Richard Scalzo and Fang Yaun, have been working with the BBC on Stargazing Live to find supernovae and providing candidates to Zooniverse for viewers all round the world to look through images for real exploding stars. The team found this object SMTJ13254308-2932269 on 18th March and immediately sent the details to Heather Campbell who is observing for PESSTO on the NTT in La Silla, Chile. She took a spectrum of it and it was classified as a genuine supernova of type Ic by the PESSTO support team of Mat Smith and Regis Cartier at University of Southampton.
They immediately sent the announcement of the object’s discovery to The Astronomer’s Telegram and sent the data electronically to Ilan Manulis at the Weizmann Institute of Science. You can see the spectrum here in our data repository.
Thanks to all the viewers and Zooniverse classifiers who took part, you helped turn round the discovery fast. Keep looking and keep the supernovae coming!