The explosive, violent deaths of stars are being used to help measure how much our universe is expanding.
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The Australian National University is calling for citizen scientist's help in their quest to spot supernovae, a flashpoint so powerful it can briefly outshine millions of stars in the galaxy.
Using a web portal on zooniverse.org people can search for these luminous bursts in thousands of images taken by the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU Sliding Spring Observatory.
Co-lead researcher ANU astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker said scientists could measure the distance of a supernova from Earth by calculating how much the light from the exploding star faded.
"Using exploding stars as markers all across the universe, we can measure how the universe is growing and what it's doing," said Dr Tucker from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"We can then use that information to better understand dark energy, the cause of the universe's acceleration."
Understanding dark energy is now a major international research enterprise and analysing Type 1a supernovae was crucial to this field, co-lead researcher Dr Anais Möller said.
She said Type 1a supernovae were of particular interest as scientists understood the amount of light they emitted when they exploded and could calculate their distance from earth by how much that faded.
Dr Möller explained dark energy, a force thought to cause the expansion of the universe, with an example of two ants standing still on top of a balloon.
"You inflate the balloon and these ants, the distance between them is getting bigger, but they are not moving or doing anything," she said.
"I always think of dark energy as that. The energy is making the space bigger but we don't feel it."
Dr Möller said unlike the public search for Planet 9 earlier this year images were coming in every weekly for this project from the 1.3 metre telescope - the only one comprehensively surveying the southern sky.
"We are examining an area 10,000 times larger than the full moon every week," she said. "The first people who identify an object that turns out to be a supernova will be publicly recognised as co-discoverers."
Searching for brilliant supernovae was a fun activity for the public, but would hopefully help to illuminate greater ability to measure the forces which shape our universe, Dr Möller said.
