User:Efraim Halevy Sela/sandbox

As of January 1, 2016 the Transient Name Server (TNS) is the official IAU mechanism for reporting new astronomical transients (ATs) such as Supernova candidates. Once spectroscopically confirmed, new Supernova discoveries are officially designated a SN name (of the form SN 2016A and so on, as before).

This is a continuation of the IAU naming scheme for supernovae which was handled by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams until the end of 2015, and has been approved as the official IAU naming scheme by the IAU Executive Committee from 1st January 2016.

This service is provided by the IAU supernova working group, free of charge to registered users, who can also choose to receive automated email alerts regarding new discoveries and classifications.

The TNS discovery and classification reports - ATs/CRs that are the official "discoverers"/"classifiers" - are officially indexed on the NASA ADS system.

The TNS website provides various statistics for the reported transients and classifications, including detailed timelines of the reports and full-skymap projections of the reported astronomical transients and classified Supernovae. These can be viewed here.

The AstroNotes service, which is becoming extensively used by the time-domain astronomy community, allows all registered accounts to distribute notifications regarding a broad range of astrophysical topics to the TNS users that choose to subscribe to the AstroNotes service.

Additional details and information on using the system, including detailed descriptions on how to create/join groups, report via the interactive forms and utilize the APIs for sending in reports or retrieving data can be found on the TNS help page.

The TNS was developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science - the Dept of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, with the involvement of the following people in the design, development and administration of the TNS: Dr. Ofer Yaron, Mr. Avner Sass, Mr. Nikola Knezevic, Prof. Eran Ofek and Prof. Avishay Gal-Yam.