1,500 New Type 1A Supernova Found as Part of the Dark Energy Survey

Supernova explosions are fascinating because they’re so cataclysmic, powerful, and awe inspiring. They’re Nature’s summer blockbusters. Humans have recorded their existence in ancient astronomical records and stone carvings , and in our age, with telescopes. Now, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has uncovered the largest number of Type 1A supernovae ever found with a single telescope.

Finding large numbers of them is about more than just cataloguing these exploding stars. Type 1A supernovae serve as standard candles, reliable markers for determining astronomical distances . That means they can help us understand the expansion of the Universe and the force that drives it: Dark Energy.

That’s the goal of the international effort of the Dark Energy Survey (DES.) The DES operates the Dark Energy Camera (DECam.) DECam works in conjunction with the 4 meter (13 t.) Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter American Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile. DECam has a 550 megapixel CCD, wide field vision, and can see the red shifted light from distant galaxies.

It also works in visible and ultraviolet light. In the late 1990s, astronomers with the National Science Foundation NOIRLab discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. This was a surprise to scientists, who thought that the expansion was slowing down. Observations of Type 1a supernovae led to this new understanding, and scientists call the force that drives the accelerated expansion ‘Dark Energy.’ “It’s a really massive scale up from 25 years ago when only 52 supernovae were used to infer dark energy.” Now, scientists at the DES have turned to Type 1a supernovae again to see what else they can learn about Dark Energy.

They presented their results at the 243rd AAS Conference and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The research is titled “ The Dark Energy Survey: Cosmology Results With ~1500 New High redshift Type Ia Supernovae Using The Full 5 year Dataset. ” The paper has well over 100 authors, all with the DES Collaboration .

To perform the survey, the DECam mapped almost one eighth of the entire sky, taking 758 nights over six years to do it. The observations captured about two million distant galaxies and several thousand supernovae. After filtering through all of the results, the team had over 1500 Type 1a supernovae.

“After accounting for the likelihood of each SN being an SN Ia, we find 1635 DES SN in the redshift range 0.10.