All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN)
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), an Ohio State-led automated telescope network that observes the entire sky every night, recently received a combined $3 million in funding, ensuring its all-encompassing surveys through August 2026.
Five-year, $1.5 million grants awarded by both the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will help guarantee ASAS-SN’s images and data continue to support and inform research spanning all branches of astronomy.
“It remains the only project in optical light that actually observes the whole sky frequently,” said ASAS-SN co-principal investigator Krzysztof Stanek, professor and University Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Astronomy. “It’s awesome that foundations like Moore and Sloan want to support this research. We are very grateful.”
ASAS-SN consists of 20 automated telescopes distributed around the world that combine to compile thousands of images per night to find things up to 50,000 times fainter than the human eye can see. The images are catalogued and compared to previous images of the same patches of sky to look for objects that have changed in brightness — in particular, explosive, transient events. These include exploding stars (supernovae), tidal disruption events where a star is ripped apart by a supermassive black hole and events associated with other probes of the variable sky like neutrinos.
