By Ron Cowen
Talk about an explosive personality. Large galaxies usually have no more than three supernovas blow up in a century, but the nearby galaxy NGC 1316 has had two such explosions within the past 5 months and four in the past 26 years.
Amateur astronomer Berto Monard of Pretoria, South Africa, found both of the new supernovas. He reported the latest find in a Nov. 6 electronic telegram of the International Astronomical Union. After that announcement, Stefan Immler of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues used NASA’s Swift satellite to view the two most recent stellar explosions. They unveiled their image Nov. 20. The team confirmed that like the earlier two NGC 1316 supernovas, the most recent ones belong to the class called type 1a.