Machine Learning Tools Automatically Classify 1,000 Supernovae

ZTF scans the night skies every night to look for changes called transient events. This includes everything from moving asteroids to black holes that have just eaten stars to exploding stars known as supernovae. ZTF sends out hundreds of thousands of alerts a night to astronomers around the world, notifying them of these transient events. The astronomers then use other telescopes to follow up and investigate the nature of the changing objects. So far, ZTF data have led to the discovery of thousands of supernovae.