Want to catch a supernova? There’s a new app for that Premium
The Hindu
A new smartphone capp called ZARTH uses the open-source Sky Map and adds data daily from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)’s robotic telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. ZARTH is short for ‘ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter’, and is built along the lines of the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.
A clear night sky can be deceptively calm, stars shimmering across its inky blackness and the occasional meteor or satellite flitting across your field of view. But this serenity hides a violent universe where planets, asteroids, and comets move constantly, where stars are born and die in explosive supernovae, and black holes – the incredibly dense debris of dead stars – spin and collide, ripping apart spacetime itself.
Astronomers have a grandstand view of this dynamic cosmos every time they peer through their telescopes. But now technology has made it possible for any space enthusiast, too, to watch these cosmic events called transients (typically lasting fractions of a second to days or even years), with the help of nothing more than a smartphone.
The ubiquitous smartphone is a powerful tool to collect astronomy data not just for the professional astronomer but for the casual stargazer as well. Just install the right apps on your phone and voila! It transforms into a powerful pocket toolkit, its compass and gyro sensors precisely aligning your telescope, or binoculars, with the focus of your observation in the sky. And since smartphones these days have amazing cameras, apps can further extend their low-light capabilities so that, once paired with a telescope, the phone turns into a veritable looking glass to the heavens.
There are space-focused apps galore for both Android and iOS phones that can be downloaded – many are free – to help you find and record objects and astronomical phenomena in the night sky. The Google Sky Map, for example, is described as “a hand-held planetarium for your Android device” and can locate and identify stars, planets, and nebulae (enormous clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space) in seconds. NASA’s free smartphone app, one of the most popular all-in-one space-focused apps around, does even more: besides helping you find your way around the sky, it also provides images, videos, and exclusive updates on current and scheduled space missions.
Nevertheless, an exclusive app for finding optical transients, transients which can be observed in visible light, has been missing – until now.
A team of researchers led by Ashish Mahabal, an astronomer and the lead computational and data scientist at the Center for Data Driven Discovery, California Institute of Technology, has developed an app that allows anyone with a smartphone to ‘hunt’ for transients.
The app uses the open-source Sky Map and adds data daily from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)’s robotic telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. Palomar is also home to one of the oldest, largest, and most powerful telescopes in the world: the 200-inch Hale reflector. The ZTF scans the entire northern sky every two days and uses the data to make large area sky maps that have important applications in tracking near-earth asteroids and studying supernovae.
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