Finding Supernovae

A supernova is one of the most energetic explosive events in the universe. These occur at the end of a star's lifetime.

The brightness of the supernova peaks around one month after the explosion, then it decays with a half-life of one week (samples of supernova light curves).

Subaru telescope has ability to detect a dozen of supernovae in its field of view. The most popular procedure to search for the supernovae is to carry out subtraction of the two images taken on different epochs separated by about one month. Variable objects can be identified in the subtraction image.

Supernova found by Subaru Telescope.

There are many kinds of variable objects other than the supernova; so to confirm whether the objects found by this method are supernova or not it is necessary to measure the light curve more closely and also to measure its spectrum. But this is out of scope for this contest..

The Challenge Committee provides:

celestial images taken on two or more epochs by Suprime-Cam of the Subaru telescope
software for carrying out image subtraction and source detection,
distributed computing system.

The amount of all the data is around several hundreds of GB, and the time for processing the data is expected to be several hundreds of hours if it is executed on a single CPU. The task imposed on a competitor is to find supernova candidates rapidly using the distributed computing system.