The Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) is a collaborative experiment led by Greg Aldering, 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.
| Alternative names | SNfactory |
|---|---|
The project began as an outgrowth of the Supernova Cosmology Project 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's Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking 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 88-inch (2.2 m) telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Results from the project will also be used in refining the planned Supernova/Acceleration Probe.
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