In an effort to better study fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae, scientists are using an innovative process called the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory. Peter Nugent, who heads the project’s division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains that this new surveying technique relies on follow-up observations from other telescopes across the world.

"The way the survey goes is we have a telescope which surveys about 20 percent of the visible sky every single night. And then once we find something, then we trigger, many, many telescopes upwards of 10 to 15 different telescopes all across the world and in space."

Nugent says that using this collaborative process has allowed his team to identify the chemical composition of various supernovae.

"An alert goes out and to anybody who’s on a telescope we ask them to swing over and try to take a spectrum of this object where we can actually look to see what chemicals are being produced in the supernova."