NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture a stellar detonation, or supernova, that likely occurred long before any of us were born.
The images were found in a review of Hubble observation archival data from 2010 and detailed in a study published in Nature, a scientific journal. Researchers say that the telescope captured three images over eight days.
This is the first detailed look at a supernova so early in the history of the universe, according to NASA.
“It is quite rare that a supernova can be detected at a very early stage because that stage is really short,” said Wenlai Chen, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study. “It only lasts for hours to a few days, and it can be easily missed even for a nearby detection. In the same exposure, we are able to see a sequence of the images — like multiple faces of a supernova.”
This star, known as a red supergiant, was roughly 530 times the mass of the sun and resided in a dwarf galaxy. It died in a cataclysmal explosion that blew its outer layers of gas into the surrounding space in an event known as a supernova.
The unprecedented images were made possible through a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when space bends around massive objects, distorting or magnifying the light behind them.
The galaxy cluster Abell 370 acted as a cosmic lens for the supernova, bending and magnifying its light from behind the cluster.
The first image of the exploding star was from about six hours after the initial blast and shows the explosion as starting relatively small and extremely hot — about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Reuters. The second image was from two days later, and the third and final was from about six days after the second.
The colors in the images denote the temperature, thus making it possible to illustrate the rapid cooling which occurred between when they were taken.
As the supernova expanded and cooled, its color shifted “from a hot blue to a cool red,” explained Patrick Kelly, a University of Minnesota astronomy professor and co-author of the study.
“It’s kind of like seeing a film reel in color of the supernova evolving,” he added.
Of course, this film reel was documenting an event that occurred when the universe was less than a fifth of its current age.
“When astronomers see more distant objects,” Kelly remarked, “they are looking back in time.”