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What an explosion! The first such unusual photo of a supernova
Not long ago, NASA released a remarkable photo of a supernova explosion. It’s unique in that it captures the exact moment of the explosion. Never before have stars been seen exploding so early in their lives.
This unusual phenomenon, designated SN 2020 fqv, was first observed by a team of astronomers led by Ryan Foley of the University of California Santa Cruz, working at the Palomar Observatory in California. The researchers soon realized that other observatories, such as the TESS space telescope, must have also recorded the supernova explosion. Indeed, TESS, designed mainly to search for extrasolar planets, also saw the explosion. So a message was quickly issued to the Hubble Space Telescope to direct the mirror to the right place. And it worked. Here’s an image of the supernova literally at the moment it exploded. Previously, supernovae have been photographed, but always some time after the explosion — days, weeks or months. Today we see the very beginning. This is extraordinary.
Explosions of massive stars
The explosion was spotted in April 2020 in the galaxy NGC 4568 in the constellation Virgo, 60 million light years away. The galaxy is in close proximity to, and possibly in collision with, a similar galaxy — NGC 4567 — hence the two are commonly called the…
