Unraveling the Mystery of the Cosmos: UMass Lowell Students Study Supernova Phenomenon with Cutting-Edge Tools

In a distant corner of the cosmos, 21 million light-years away from our home planet Earth, a celestial body of immense size and power erupted in an explosion that would come to be known as a supernova. This cosmic event, which occurred when the star reached the end of its life cycle and collapsed under its own gravity, sent shockwaves across the galaxy and captured the attention of scientists around the world.

Among those who were drawn to the spectacle was a trio of undergraduate physics majors from UMass Lowell: Jacob Medin, Ian Davis, and Jordan Orenberg. Funded by the Kennedy College of Sciences’ Science Discoveries program, these bright young minds were tasked with studying this rare phenomenon during the summer after their first year at college. Under the tutelage of Physics Assoc. Prof. Silas Laycock and with assistance from Physics Ph.D. student Sayantan Bhattacharya ’21, they set out to capture images of the supernova using UMass Lowell’s Schueller Observatory’s powerful telescope.

But their thirst for knowledge could not be quenched by just one observatory’s worth of data. They also collaborated with Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston to obtain additional images of the supernova. Armed with these multiple perspectives, they used AstroImageJ – a cutting-edge software designed for analyzing astronomical photographs – to upload and analyze their data. Over three months, they painstakingly tracked the magnitude of the supernova by observing its brightness and temperature changes.

Their efforts paid off: The data collected by these intrepid students is now available to researchers everywhere through the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), an organization dedicated to studying stars that fluctuate in brightness. And Jordan Orenberg couldn’t have been happier about contributing to humanity’s understanding of these cosmic phenomena while sharing their findings with the world at large