Welcome! I'm Tanner Murphey

PhD Student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Hunting exploding stars across the universe with the Dark Energy Camera. Passionate about space, sports, and statistics.

Research Areas

Supernovae

I study the brightest explosions in the universe, the ones that create many of the elements we need for life as well as tell us about the very history of the universe we live in.

Data Science

I'm an LSST-DA Data Science Fellow specializing in the study of large populations of supernovae. By studying these at a population level, we can answer questions like "How vast is the universe expanding?" and "How did the elements past Carbon get to the abundances we see them at today?"

High Performance Computing

I work with extreme amounts of raw image data, well over 100TB. To process this, I use the Illinois Campus Cluster and am a member of the Center for Astrophysical Surveys at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Recent Publications

JWST and Ground-based Observations of the Type Iax Supernovae SN 2024pxl and SN 2024vjm: Evidence for Weak Deflagration Explosions

Submitted to AAS Journals • 2025

Photometry and Spectroscopy of SN 2024pxl: A Luminosity Link Among Type Iax Supernovae

Submitted to ApJ • 2025

Witnessing history: sky distribution, detectability, and rates of naked-eye Milky Way supernovae

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society • 2020

The Plane's The Thing: The Case for Wide-Fast-Deep Coverage of the Galactic Plane and Bulge

arXiv • 2018