Astronomers happened to be looking at the moment a star exploded (Image: NASA/Princeton U/Gemini Observatories)
Talk about right place, right time. Quite by chance, astronomers have captured footage of a star blowing itself to smithereens.
Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the sun meet their deaths in catastrophic explosions when their core runs out of fuel. The core can collapse into a black hole or neutron star, generating a shock wave that ploughs outwards, blasting the star’s atmosphere apart.
Hundreds of supernovae are seen every year, but usually days or weeks after the event (in the Earth’s…
