There’s more than one way to explode a star. Four recently seen type 1a supernovas show off some of this diversity. One supernova hints at the gas of a partner star fueling the explosion; colliding white dwarfs — the exposed cores of dead stars — probably triggered the other three.
The observations, described in a pair of papers in the May 21 Nature, give astronomers a rare look at the first few days of a stellar detonation.