The new publication “Rapid follow-up of infant supernovae with the Gran Telescopio de Canarias” was released on arXiv last Friday. Dane Cross from the Observational Cosmology group at IFAE contributed to the study.

Early observations of supernovae can give us crucial insight into the progenitors of these systems, which can in turn allow us to study possible systematic effects for measurements of cosmology using supernovae. With many new transient surveys coming online in the next decade, a clear plan for detection and follow-up schemes must be developed so we can get as much early data from supernovae as possible. In this paper, we examine 10 early observations of various types of supernovae, and demonstrate that with a rapid spectroscopic program and stringent triggering criteria, it is possible to obtain a sample of supernova spectra within one day of explosion.