News Summary

• Type Ia supernovae are some of the most violent events in the universe.
• They're also one of astronomy's most powerful measuring tools.
• Traditional methods simply cannot keep up.
• New method uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to disentangle all the competing influences on a supernova's brightness.
• It combines galaxy evolution, dust effects, stellar age and chemical composition into a single unified model rather than correcting for each factor separately in a chain of approximations.
• CIGaRS achieved cosmological measurements four times more precise than methods dependent on that small spectroscopic fraction.