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In the most epic time frame you’ll see today, NASA’s Hubble Telescope captured the explosion and disappearance of a star 70 million light-years away.
Space lovers, you’ll want to clean your glasses for this one. A Hubble Space Telescope program has captured “Nature’s own atomic bomb” in a period of time that covers a whole year.
The time lapse was developed as part of a program by NASA and the European Space Agency that measures the rate of expansion of our universe. While supernovae occur at a rate of about one per second, it is extremely rare to capture images of visibly dying stars. Who needs that kind of morbid reality check anyway?
The telescope began observing the white dwarf star in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, 70 million light years from Earth, after astronomer Koichi Itagaki realized it was reaching the supernova point in January 2018.
It took a year for the time span to capture the violent eruption, a celestial event that emitted as much energy as our sun for a few billion years.
Supernovae not only serve as fireworks for us to contemplate our utter and utter insignificance, but they also serve as measurements of how far we are from other galaxies. It is a crucial measure to understand the expansion of space, as explained by NASA in a press release:
“By knowing the actual brightness of the supernova and observing its brightness in the sky, astronomers can calculate the distances of their host galaxies … The titanic explosion, which briefly outshined the entire host galaxy, originated from a white dwarf which added material from his fellow star. “
“This accumulation of gas eventually unleashed a runaway thermonuclear explosion, making nature’s own atomic bomb dwarf. The unleashed energy briefly equaled the glow of five billion suns. “
