Astrophysics (Index)About

supernova designator

(typical designation of supernovae)

Supernova designators for confirmed supernovae have an IAU standard: the prefix SN followed by a year its electromagnetic radiation reached Earth, and if needed, a suffix distinguishing the year's confirmed supernovae. For many historical supernovae, the year is sufficient, e.g., SN 1604. More recently many are confirmed for each year, and a suffix is used to indicate the order of their discovery:

Example: SN 1998bw, sometimes written sn1998bw or in context, abbreviated to 1998bw. Methods of identifying transients that could be supernovae have improved, with thousands of supernovae now detected each year and the Rubin Observatory promises to increase the discovery rate. The sequence of letter suffixes formerly approximated the confirmation-order of the transient as a supernova, but now (since 2016) the year and suffix are assigned to transients on discovery (without waiting for confirmation as a supernova) using a default prefix of AT, for astronomical transient. If and when confirmed as a supernova, the prefix SN (with exactly the same year/discovery indicator) is also considered valid, though the AT version of the designator may still be frequently used, e.g., AT2018cow. Thus, some of the suffixes only apply to transients that are not considered supernovae. The IAU's Transient Name Server (TNS) is a clearinghouse for such naming, taking reports of transients, assigning AT- and SN-based designations, and providing online access to the names.

Such transients often are first given a survey-based designator for the survey that discovered them. In sifting through data for transients, such surveys must track "candidate-transients" that have even less confirmation, often using formats for the survey-specific order of discovery that are analogous but recognizably-different. One convention used by such surveys is to list the years as two-digits instead of four, e.g., ATLAS18qqn, an ATLAS survey discovery.


(supernovae,designation,astronomy)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#Naming_convention
https://www.universetoday.com/92173/supernova-alphabet-soup/
https://www.wis-tns.org/content/tns-getting-started
https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_stars/
http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-new-supernovae-alphabet-soup.html
https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/supernova.html

Referenced by pages:
AT2018cow
Cassiopeia A
fast radio burst (FRB)

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