The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) is a collaborative experiment led by

Greg Aldering Gregory Scott Aldering (born 1960), also known simply as Greg Aldering is an American astronomer, discoverer of minor planets and supernovae, currently with the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. As a high school student in ...

, designed to collect data on more Type Ia supernovae than have ever been studied in a single project before, and by studying them, to increase understanding of the expanding universe and

dark energy In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. The first observational evidence for its existence came from measurements of supernovas, which showed that the univ ...

. The project began as an outgrowth of the

Supernova Cosmology Project The Supernova Cosmology Project is one of two research teams that determined the likelihood of an accelerating universe and therefore a positive cosmological constant, using data from the redshift of Type Ia supernovae. The project is headed by S ...

at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but while the SCP focused on supernovae with redshifts of approximately 1.2, corresponding to a distance of 8.7 billion light years, SNfactory searches for nearby supernovae with redshifts of 0.03 to 0.08, corresponding to a distance of only 400 million to 1.1 billion light years. SNfactory uses a highly automated "pipeline" in which survey images from

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) was a program run by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, surveying the sky for near-Earth objects. NEAT was conducted from December 1995 until April 2007, at GEODSS on Hawaii (Haleakala-NEAT; 566), as we ...

project are processed by a supercomputing cluster to find promising candidates, which are then observed using the project's Supernova Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS) on the

University of Hawaii A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, th ...

telescope atop Mauna Kea in

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only state ...

. Results from the project will also be used in refining the planned

Supernova/Acceleration Probe The Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) was an Einstein probe that planned to focus on investigating dark energy. JDEM was a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In August 2010, the Board on Physics and Astronomy of ...

External links

Nearby Supernova Factory
Supernovae {{astronomy-stub

See also

External links