With countless stars in the universe, you would think their explosive death is nothing special. Yet it is something we rarely get to see. So it is quite spectacular that the Hubble space telescope managed to capture such a supernova.
In January 2018, a bright explosion of light was observed at the edges of galaxy NGC 2525, 70 million light years away. A month later, Hubble pointed its lens exactly in that direction and began taking pictures for a year until the supernova slowly died out and was no longer visible.
The telescope missed the dying star’s peak. That was an outburst 5 billion times the light of the sun, but the light that the exploding star gave off when Hubble began photographing was still extremely bright.
“No fireworks on Earth can compete with this supernova, captured by Hubble in its fading glory,” said Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess. The supernova, called SN 2018gv, is more than just cosmic fireworks. It is used by astrophysicists and cosmologists to calculate how fast the universe is expanding.
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