The BTSbot-nearby Discovery of SN 2024jlf: Rapid, Autonomous Follow-up Probes Interaction in an 18.5 Mpc Type IIP Supernova

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

W. M. Keck Observatory, MMT Observatory, and Zwicky Transient Facility access for N.R., A.A.M., S.S., and C.L. was supported by Northwestern University and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).

The material contained in this document is based on work supported by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant or cooperative agreement. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA. This work was supported through a NASA grant awarded to the Illinois/NASA Space Grant Consortium.

This research was supported in part through the computational resources and staff contributions provided for the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern University, which is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern University Information Technology.

Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants Nos. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, University of Warwick, Ruhr University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Drexel University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

The Young Supernova Experiment is supported by the National Science Foundation through grants AST-1518052, AST-1815935, AST-1852393, AST-1911206, AST-1909796, and AST-1944985; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; NASA through grants NNG17PX03C, 80NSSC19K1386, and 80NSSC20K0953; the Danish National Research Foundation through grant DNRF132; VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grants 16599, 10123, and 25501; the Science and Technology Facilities Council through grants ST/P000312/1, ST/S006109/1, and ST/T000198/1; the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) through project no. CE170100013; the Hong Kong government through GRF grant HKU27305119; the Independent Research Fund Denmark via grant Nos. DFF 4002-00275 and 8021-00130; and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie through grant No. 891744.

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

YSE computations are aided by the University of Chicago Research Computing Center, the Illinois Campus Cluster, and facilities at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC.

Observations reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, a joint facility of the University of Arizona and the Smithsonian Institution.

The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

SED Machine is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1106171. The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under Heising-Simons Foundation grant No. 12540303 (PI: Graham). The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, through both the Data-Driven Investigator Program and a dedicated grant, provided critical funding for SkyPortal.

Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku, and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland, and Norway; the University of Iceland; and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

N.R., C.L., and A.A.M. are supported by DoE award No. DE-SC0025599. W.J.-G. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HSTHF2-51558.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), through project no. CE230100016 and the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) through project no. DE230101069. M.W.C acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with grant Nos. PHY-2308862 and PHY-2117997. D.O.J. acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-2407632 and AST-2429450, NASA grant 80NSSC24M0023, and HST/JWST grants HST-GO-17128.028, HST-GO-16269.012, and JWST-GO-05324.031, awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. S.R.K. thanks the Heising-Simons Foundation for supporting his research.

This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology.

Software citation information aggregated using the Software Citation Station (T. Wagg & F. S. Broekgaarden 2024; T. Wagg et al. 2024).

Facilities

PO:1.2m - Palomar Observatory's 1.2 meter Samuel Oschin Telescope (ZTF), PO:1.5m - Palomar Observatory's 1.5 meter Telescope (SEDM), Liverpool:2m - Liverpool 2 meter telesope at Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (SPRAT), MMT - MMT at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (Binospec), NED, NOT - Nordic Optical Telescope (ALFOSC), Keck:I - KECK I Telescope (LRIS), Keck:II - KECK II Telescope (KCWI), ATT - Advanced Technology Telescope (WiFeS).

Software References

astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), Jupyter (F. Perez & B. E. Granger 2007; T. Kluyver et al. 2016), Keras (F. Chollet et al. 2015), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) (2019), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), pandas (W. McKinney 2010; The pandas development team 2024), penquins (D. Duev et al. 2021), python (G. Van Rossum & F. L. Drake 2009), scipy (W. McKinney 2010; P. Virtanen et al. 2020; R. Gommers et al. 2024), astroquery (A. Ginsburg et al. 2019; A. Ginsburg et al. 2024), Cython (S. Behnel et al. 2011), dustmaps (G. Green 2018; G. Green et al. 2024), h5py (G. Green 2018; G. Green et al. 2024), SkyPortal (S. J. van der Walt et al. 2019; M. W. Coughlin et al. 2023), tensorflow (M. Abadi et al. 2015), tqdm (C. da Costa-Luis 2019), and the Weights and Biases platform (L. Biewald 2020). The BTSbot-nearby alert filter in MongoDB aggregation pipeline syntax and additional utilities for testing it can be found at https://github.com/nabeelre/BTSbot-nearby-utils.