The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST), jointly built by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO), is the largest time-domain survey facility in the northern hemisphere. WFST is characterized by a 2.5-meter primary mirror and a prime-focus camera with a field of view 6.5 square degrees filled with 9 × 9K × 9K mosaic CCD detectors (Wang, T., et al., 2023, SCPMA, 6609512). Data processing is carried out at USTC that combines automatic data reduction with the WFST pipeline, coordinate cross-matching with astronomical catalogs, machine learning image recognition, visual check for promising transient candidates (WFST collaboration, in prep). More information can be found on the WFST homepage.
Here we report 545 reliable supernova candidates (including 13 spectroscopically identified supernovae on TNS) discovered by the pilot survey of the 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST-PS) from March 6th to July 10th, 2024 (Jiang, J.-a., et al. in prep). After crosschecking with the existing TNS reports, 408 supernova candidates are newly reported* and 120 previously reported SNe/candidates were firstly discovered by WFST. A list of all WFST-PS supernova candidates can be found here.
WFST transient alerts are expected to be issued in real time during the six-year WFST Time-Domain Survey Project from October 2024 (Wang, T., et al., 2023, SCPMA, 6609512). Spectroscopic classifications and follow-up observations of future WFST transients are encouraged.
This report is based on observations obtained with the 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) at Mt. Saishiteng, Lenghu, China. The WFST science products have been made possible through the contributions of USTC and PMO.
Note*: 3 new supernova candidates are mistakenly matched with previous TNS transients due to small coordinate differences. Therefore, 405 new TNS transient ids for the 408 newly reported supernova candidates.
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