Distance Less that 40 Mpc Supernova search
Distance less than 40 Mpc (DLT40) supernova search: Since 2016, we are running a supernova search by observing 1000 nearby galaxies (within 40 Mpc) with a robotic telescope every night. The goal of the project is to discover supernovae within 24 hours of explosion and promptly follow their evolution in the minutes, hours after the explosion using a network of robotic telescopes distributed around the world. This is because, in the early hours to days after explosion, SNe provide clues to how they explode, and what their progenitor star systems are. In 2017, we extended the search (DLT40+) to increase the cadence of the observations to every 12 hours using two telescopes (in Chile and in Australia). In 2021, we extended the search to the north hemisphere adding a third telescope in Canada. DLT40 is the only supernova search that can provide 12 hours cadence observations of nearby galaxies. The project has been founded, so far, two times by NSF. I built the DLT40 search engine that is running in Davis and we are now in the process of expanding DLT40 to 8 telescopes. The goal is to use a boosted version of the DLT40 engine to search for optical counterparts of gravitational waves during next LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA observing runs. One NSF proposal for this new DLT40-GW project has been approved in 2020.
The Arizona and Davis group involved in the DLT40 project