Want to catch a supernova? There’s a new app for that

Subject: Science and technology

Section: Space technology

Context:

The compass and gyroscope sensors of a smartphone can precisely align the telescope, or binoculars, with the focus of one’s observation in the sky.
The 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.

Space-based Apps:

The Google Sky Map 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 helps in finding the way around the sky, providing images, videos, and exclusive updates on current and scheduled space missions.

A new App- ZARTH:

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 (Space related phenomenon and events typically lasting fractions of a second to days or even years).
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.
The new app, called ZARTH, short for ‘ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter’, is built along the lines of the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.
Its USP is that it allows the user to do serious science while playing a game.
Students from the Indian Institutes of Technology at Mandi and Gandhinagar were also involved in developing ZARTH.
This new app is inspired by the game Pokemon Go.
In the ZARTH app, users have to ‘catch’ a transient, and once they catch it, the app shows more details about it.
ZARTH ranks transients by their rarity and importance.

Significance:

The game (or App) can be introduced in the classroom courses
Encouraging students to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) studies.
Detection of rare and new astronomical events.

Terms:

Supernovae: A supernova is the explosion of a star. It is the largest explosion that takes place in space.
- A supernova occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion.
Black Hole: A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it.
- Black hole is the incredibly dense debris of dead stars.
Hale Telescope: The Hale Telescope is a 200-inch (5.1 m), f/3.3 reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, US, named after astronomer George Ellery Hale.
- The Hale was groundbreaking for its time, with double the diameter of the second-largest telescope, and pioneered many new technologies in telescope mount design and in the design and fabrication of its large aluminum coated “honeycomb” low thermal expansion Pyrex mirror.
- It was completed in 1949 and is still in active use.