Using the Zooniverse to Produce a Catalog of 277 Type II SNe from the Bright Transient Survey

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has proven to be a prolific supernova (SN) discovery machine. The ZTF Bright Transient Survey (BTS) aims to publicly announce spectroscopic classifications for all extragalactic transients that ZTF observes to be brighter than 18.5 mag. While automated tools are used to support this classification effort, final spectroscopic classifications are only confirmed following visual inspection. Requiring visual inspection adds latency to the announcement process. In order to tackle this issue, we created the Zwicky Chemical Factory, a Citizen Science project on the Zooniverse. Through this platform volunteers are able to analyze and classify transient spectra. Zwicky Chemical Factory users are presented new spectra and the best-fit templates from Supernova Identification (SNID). When comparing Zwicky Chemical Factory results with automated spectral classifications from Superfit, we can achieve a 70% true positive rate while classifying Type Ia SNe and ~43% true positive rate while classifying Type II SNe at a 0.5% false positive rate. These rates allow for over half of discovered SNe to be classified without a team member having to look at a single spectrum. This process is currently being implemented to automatically upload classifications to the Transient Name Server (TNS). Using this method of classification, we found 277 Type II SNe in the Bright Transient Survey.