Hubble Captures First Ever Predicted Supernova
Scientists have finally snapped a picture of a supernova in action.
The Hubble Space Telescope has caught an exploding star in the act.
The supernova, nicknamed Refsdal in honour of the Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal, was spotted on December 11 in the catchily titled galaxy cluster, MACS J1149.5+2223. The light from the supernova has taken over 5 billion years to reach us.
Plenty of stars go out with a bang, but predicting them is a tricky business and capturing them is even harder.
Scientists had a head start with this one as, weirdly, we've actually seen it before.
The galaxy in which the Refsdal supernova went kaboom is actually being lensed by its local galaxy cluster due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This means that the image of the galaxy actually appears three times in the sky and, due to the lensing effect, the three images are on a bit of a time lag.
Back in November 2014, scientists spotted four separate images of the supernova in a formation known as an Einstein Cross. They used this to predict when the next image of the same event would next reach us through one of the other "lensed" images so that we could be ready to snap a picture.
Amazingly, they also managed to figure out from the data that the supernova had previously appeared in the sky back in 1998, but there were no telescopes pointed at it at the time.
This is the first time we've been able to predict and capture the death of a star all thanks to a quirk of gravity.
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