The Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) is an optical time-domain survey using the two Pan-STARRS and CTIO Blanco telescopes, and a myriad of spectroscopic follow-up facilities. Our survey is designed to obtain well-sampled griz light curves for thousands of transient events up to z ≈ 0.2 and tens of thousands of variable sources. This large sample of transients with four-band light curves will lay the foundation for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, providing a well-calibrated low-redshift anchor of cosmologically useful SNe Ia to study the equation-of-state of dark energy and its evolution. But YSE is much more than a type Ia supernova cosmology experiment, and as the name suggests, YSE discovers transients as faint as ~21.5 mag in gri and ~20.5 mag in z with Pan-STARRS and 1.5 magnitudes deeper with DECam - depths that allow us to probe the earliest epochs of stellar explosions. YSE therefore also provides a critical training set, allowing the new NSF-Simons SkAI Institute to develop foundation models for forecasting, anomaly detection and much else for use with Rubin Observatory. I will provide a flavor for some of the many science cases that YSE enables, highlighting a few key results, and how YSE and SkAI together can enable on-the-fly inference for every transient discovered by Rubin Observatory, revolutionizing time-domain astrophysics.
Speaker: Gautham Narayan, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Host: Tjitske Starkenburg