Superluminous Supernovae now and in the future

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Superluminous supernovae (SLSNe) are extraordinary events; 100 times brighter than normal supernova. Recent advances in survey astronomy have started to uncover these explosions at a much higher rate than previously envisioned and future surveys by LSST could uncover thousands of such events. This studentship will investigate the continued detection and quantification of this population of events, looking at their physical properties (luminosities, environments) and determining if they form a coherent, homogeneous population. While looking for SLSNe, other interesting objects are possible including gravitationally lensed supernova which are rarer than SLSNe but provide possibly the perfect cosmological probe. This studentship will investigate using data from Dark Energy Survey and LSST simulations to assess the two phenomena.