For the first time, a new supernova is attributed in the records of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to the J-PAS collaboration. An international collaboration led by the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), which has already observed more than 550,000 astronomical objects. The observations on the night of 18 November 2024 also revealed its first stellar explosion, a supernova, which was detected by the engineer Javier Hernández when reviewing the images.

The observation of this supernova was carried out with the JST250 telescope. This instrument is the main equipment, together with the JPCam panoramic camera, one of the most powerful in the world, which is intended for the mapping of the sky proposed by J-PAS. The project released its first public data on 20 November and has now reached 450 000 galaxies observed in about 12 degrees of sky. The Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) mapping is the result of a unique combination: observing a large volume of the Universe in an unprecedented number of photometric bands.

The discovered supernova is located at a distance of about 700 million light-years and lies in one of the arms of a spiral galaxy, a type to which the Milky Way also belongs. The discovery was reported on 29 November to the official website of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for reporting such discoveries, the Transient Name Server (TNS). The record was made one day later, after the appropriate checks and analyses had been carried out.

Supernovae are very rare and difficult to detect phenomena that occur at the end of the life of certain stars. To give an example, a galaxy like ours, with 200 billion stars, only records about 3 supernovae per year, and these are phenomena that are only visible for a few weeks. Sometimes they are the collapse of very massive stars (with masses more than ten times that of the Sun) or thermonuclear explosions of stars at a particular stage of their evolution and orbiting a companion star. It is not yet possible to determine to which type this new supernova detected by the CEFCA scientific team belongs.

The supernova has now been officially registered in the ‘Transient Name Server’, as can be seen in this link (https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2024acpk) where technical details can be found such as the scientific name of the galaxy that hosts this newly discovered supernova, which is named with a mixture of acronyms and numbers 2MASX J00060232+1559300. The accompanying illustration has been obtained by combining all the images obtained. It is compared with an image from the PanSTARRS project, a panoramic survey telescope, which observes the entire visible sky several times a month.