Ongoing Assassin Project Has Detected 89 Supernovas To Date

Ohio State University reported that their All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN, pronounced "assassin") project has had tremendous success in detecting supernovas (supernovae). Since May 2014, ASAS-SN has detected 89 supernovae which is more than all other professional astronomical surveys combined.

The survey uses six 6-inch telescopes located in Hawaii (4) and in Chile (2). Amateurs worldwide has also volunteered their time and equipment to ASAS-SN. ASAS-SN covers the nearest 500 million light years around the Milky Way Galaxy which is about 1 percent of the observable universe.

According to the astronomists, ASAS-SN complements the work done by big telescopes since these telescopes are too sensitive to capture details of bright, nearby events. As an example, the image above was taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (left image). On 03 January 2015, the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae looked at the same region (right image) and detected a bright supernova.

Aside from supernovae, the survey has also detected two tidal disruption events which are extremely rare sightings of what happens when a black hole captures a portion of a nearby star, and many M dwarf flares, which are believed to emanate from stars with extremely strong magnetic fields.

Measuring the Universe To One Percent Accuracy With Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) Collaboration announced that they have measured the scale of the Universe to an accuracy of one percent, using galaxies more than six billion light years away.

BOSS mapped the locations of 1.2 million galaxies to make the measurements. The new distance measurements were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Harvard University astronomer Daniel Eisenstein, the director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III).

In the image, the gray spheres show the pattern of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) from the early Universe. Galaxies today have a slight tendency to align on the spheres -- the alignment is greatly exaggerated in this illustration. By comparing the size of the spheres (white line) to the predicted value, astronomers can determine to one-percent accuracy how far away the galaxies are. This concept allowed the scientists to arrive at their measurement of the size of the Universe.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey is an astronomical survey that measures the rate of expansion of the universe using the spatial distribution of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) and quasars. It is one of four components of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

SDSS-III is used to cover distant quasars at far reaches of the universe, the distribution of galaxies, the properties of stars in the Milky Way and also subjects such as dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Its instruments can make detailed measurements of 1000 galaxies at a time.

In 2012, BOSS had released their most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy activated.