Scientists want you to help them go look for exploding stars

Scientists want you to go looking for exploding stars, and nope, you won’t need much expertise to do it.

A citizen science project to find supernovae led by Brad Tucker and Anais Möller from the Australian National University (ANU) aims to help researchers figure out how big the universe is.

Supernovae can be seen from billions of light years away, and researchers are about to calculate their distance from Earth based on how bright they are.

“Supernovae are explosions as bright as 100 million billion billion billion lightning bolts, and so we can use them as markers to measure how the Universe is growing and what’s causing its expansion to accelerate,” Tucker said in a statement online. Read more…

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