For all you space geeks, we have something dazzling for you. The Hubble Space Telescope recorded footage of a supernova exploding in the sky over the course of a year, creating one of the brightest light shows ever seen. In fact, the exploding star burned at the radiance of 5 billion suns before gradually dwindling away.
The supernova, which was known as SN2018gv, was first spotted in mid-January of 2018 at the edge of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2525, about 70 million light-years from Earth. Engadget reports that it was a Type Ia supernova, meaning it originates from a binary white dwarf star that’s sucking in matter from its companion star.
After taking in the material equivalent of 1.44 times the mass of our Sun, the supernova gets hot enough to ignite carbon fusion and trigger a thermonuclear runaway process. That leads to a violent explosion that can eject matter at up to 6 percent the speed of light and cause a peak brightness of 5 billion times that of the Sun.
That brightness, however, didn’t last too long. “When a star unleashes as much energy in a matter of days as our Sun does in several billion years, you know it’s not going to remain visible for long,” NASA wrote in a blog post.
Want to see a time-lapse of the supernova exploding in the sky? Follow the link right here.
