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By Caden Fanshaw

SUPERNOVA

Prince George man makes Canadian astronomical history

Jan 11, 2021 | 10:26 AM

PRINCE GEORGE – While most of us were spending time watching things like Netflix when COVID-19 shut down the world, Malhar Kendurkar was busy looking across the sky.

CKPG News caught up with Kendurkar when he discovered his first supernova back in 2018, now he’s making Canadian history after discovering over 90 of them in the past year.

Something that has never been done before.

“I wasn’t expecting to find so many, I was guessing maybe I’d find 50 or so,” says Kendurkar. “In 2020, I discovered 94 of them and observed 14,500 galaxies.”

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Kendurkar is part of a group of five like him around the world called the Global Supernova Search Team made up with others in France, Spain, and the United States.

Kendurkar is the Principle Investigator on this team looking for supernovas daily through telescopes and observatories in multiple countries across the world including Chile and Spain.

A handful of his discoveries made in 2020 are called gamma-ray bursts, Kendurkar calls those ones specifically exceptionally rare.

Kendurkar says many of those exceptionally rare supernovas are only visible for up to 90 seconds, making them very difficult to spot and discover.

According to NASA supernovas can tell a lot about the universe we live in, and how it is constantly changing.

One kind of supernova has shown scientists that we live in an expanding universe, one that is growing at an ever-increasing rate.

Scientists also have determined that supernovas play a key role in distributing elements throughout the universe. When the star explodes, it shoots elements and debris into space. Many of the elements we find here on Earth are made in the core of stars.

These elements travel on to form new stars, planets, and everything else in the universe.

Most of the supernovas being discovered by Kendurkar and his team are around 750 million light-years away, humans have never even traveled a single light year.

What started out as a hobby has now become his job as Kendurkar hopes to secure grant funding to build a newer telescope somewhere around Northern BC, somewhere with clearer skies as his search for more supernovas and the search for more history heads upwards.