Supernovae are stars that explode with the energy of a few 10^27 atom bombs. We want to understand which stars explode and why, but it's probably not a good idea to try and setup an experiment to recreate the explosion on Earth (not that we could anyway)! Instead we must rely on our observations of supernovae to come up with theories that explain what we see.

 

With Supernova Hunters we aim to discover lots of new explosions and pass them on to the wider astronomical community. But finding supernovae isn't easy. The large telescope we use produces vast amounts of data each night that we must sift through to find supernovae. We have software that tries to do this for us, but it produces many bogus detections of supernovae that must be filtered out by humans.