Finding and classifying a supernova · Ceded (since 2023)

SN 2023tyk was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility on 3 October 2023, picked out by the BTSbot model on 5 October, classified by a robotic spectrograph, and reported to the community on 7 October with no human step in between.

A survey of this kind raises between a hundred thousand and a million detections a night, far beyond what any roster of astronomers could look at, and a classifier decides which of them are astrophysical rather than artefacts of the optics. What was ceded is the scanning, the candidate selection and the first classification, work done by eye on photographic plates for most of a century. Not ceded: deciding which of these events is worth a large telescope, and the physics that is read out of the follow up. The pipeline was also trained on 1.4 million labelled images, which makes it a transfer of past human looking rather than an absence of it.