By Kevin Mosedale

Over the years that I’ve used the Faulkes telescopes with students, I’ve always wanted to try to do some ‘proper’ research and then in September 2019, the Curriculum Extension Programme at Radley College (UK) offered me that opportunity. A group of five new year 12 students (aged 16-17, all but one studying Physics A level) volunteered for an astrophysics option that turned out to be very much a mutual voyage of discovery for the whole of the academic year. Whether the students or I learned the most from it is very much open to debate, but it was interesting and educational, so much so that I’m running it again from September 2021 but this time I’ve got twelve student volunteers!

The aim I had in mind at the start was to catch a type 1a supernova as soon as possible after it had occurred and plot a light curve with a view to seeing if we could measure its apparent magnitude. Knowing the absolute magnitude of a type 1a supernova (as a standard candle), we could then calculate the distance to the supernova. That, after all, is what the A-level textbooks describe as a standard technique so why not do it in real life.

There is nothing like the optimism of the amateur at the start of a project………..

Before we could do any of this, the students had to learn about supernovae, absolute and apparent magnitude, photometry and robotic telescopes. As an extension option with no syllabus or assessment objectives, I was lucky enough to have complete freedom to teach it however I liked and so it developed along more a university-type seminar model and from September to mid-November we taught ourselves most of the topics listed above. Resources from the Faulkes telescope website were invaluable (Spotting a Supernova and Photometry with Makali) and both Paul Roche and Fraser Lewis were great sources of advice and assistance. As a ‘real’ research project, we encountered lots of real-world problems that took up more time than expected but, of course, this was all part of the learning process. In particular, getting software to work on a mix of personal laptops (PC and Mac) and school computers was at times quite trying. The (relatively) new web-based photometry package, JS9, will hopefully makes things much better next time around!

The culmination of the first term’s work was an exercise from the Gaia project which used data from a 2016 supernova (Gaia16agf) to plot a light curve. The sense of achievement when the students achieved this was a great way to end the first term of supernova hunting.

The challenge now switched to finding a new supernova and here we were at the mercy of the universe! We kept an eye on the Gaia alerts service for new type 1a supernovae but after a while I realised that the Transient Name Server (TNS) website was a better place to spot them early (see Figure 2) and so it then became a waiting game. As soon as a new SN was spotted, we would try to book daily repeating observations using the LCO 1-metre telescope network and you can see the results of many attempts in Figure 3. Again, real-world problems intervened.

Observations failed because of weather or other technical problems. Sometimes the supernova was rather unhelpfully in a part of the sky not particularly well covered by LCO telescopes and of course there are other people out there who also have plans for the telescopes that might be a higher priority! All of these issues affected us and so in the end we only managed to get enough data from one supernova in April 2020 (Gaia20car) to plot a light curve and even then, with only four data points, our results were extremely tentative at best (see Figure 4). 

Figure 4 – Left: the produced light curve of supernova Gaia20car, Right: one of the students’ images of Gaia20car taken on the LCO network and their highlighted comparison stars.

Despite this, the project was fantastically interesting and a great opportunity for students to get a feel for the challenges as well as the highs and lows of real research.