On November 6, 2008, Caroline Moore of Warwick, New York discovered a supernova in galaxy UGC 12682, in the constellation Pegasus.
Caroline is 14 years old, and is the youngest person to ever discover a supernova.
Caroline and her father Bob are part of the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team. The team was founded by dedicated amateur astronomer Tim Puckett of Georgia in 1997, and currently has several dozen members around the world. They have an impressive record, having racked up 191 supernova discoveries to date.
The team has four computer-automated telescopes at work in British Columbia, Arizona, Georgia, and South Africa, collecting images of thousands of galaxies every clear night. Thousands of galaxies, and dozens of astronomers — that math isn't good. Often new images are collected too fast to analyze. Sharp new eyes are always needed, so when Caroline looked at the image of UGC 12682 last November, the photo was already two months days old. But Caroline saw something there, just barely, that she didn't see on the reference image of the galaxy.
"I'm going to send it in. I think it's something," she told her father. A couple nights later, her suspicions were confirmed. "We got confirmation very late at night," said Bob Moore. "I had to drag her out of bed, and she just started laughing."
What Caroline discovered is now known as SN2008ha, and it turns out to be a very interesting object — in fact, it is an entirely new class of supernova, never before seen.
The spectrum of the supernova was all hydrogen, which is the signature of a classic Type I supernova. But the supernova itself was dim, far dimmer than any Type I supernova — or indeed, any supernova of any type — ever observed. It was about 1000 times dimmer than a typical Type I, but was still 1000 times brighter than a typical (non-super) nova. SN2008ha turns out to be a totally unique object.
"If a normal supernova is a nuclear bomb, then SN 2008ha is a bunker buster," said team leader Ryan Foley, Clay fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and first author on the paper reporting the findings. "From one perspective, this supernova was an underachiever, however you still wouldn't want be anywhere near the star when it exploded."
Caroline was able to discover the object using a relatively small telescope, but some of the most advanced telescopes in the world were needed to determine the nature of the explosion. Data came from the Magellan telescopes in Chile, the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii, and NASA's Swift satellite.