By Nadia Drake
Many people appreciate a good light show, but probably not as much as the astronomers who recently spied a rare cosmological treat.
On August 24, telescopes at the Palomar Observatory in southern California captured a white dwarf star just 21 million light-years away — the next state over, astronomically — as it went supernova, exploding in a blaze of light. Scientists involved in the Palomar Transient Factory sky survey raced to record the detonation’s early death throes.
“We think we found it probably 12 hours after it exploded,” says astronomer Mark Sullivan of the University of Oxford in England. “The amazing thing for me is, that supernova exploded 21 million years ago. It’s taken light 21 million years to arrive. And we just happened to open up the telescope on that Wednesday night, and in came the photons.”