Now you see it, now you don't. Though stars explode at the rate of one per second in the vast universe, it's rare to get a time-lapse movie of one fading into obscurity. This disappearing act, in a galaxy 70 million light-years away, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a program to measure the universe's expansion rate. More than just providing celestial fireworks, supernovae can be used as milepost markers to measure distances to galaxies. This yardstick is needed to calculate how quickly galaxies appear to be flying apart from one another, which in turn provides an age estimate for the universe. The titanic explosion, which briefly outshined the entire host galaxy, originated from a white dwarf accreting material from its companion star. This pileup of gas eventually triggered a runaway thermonuclear explosion, making the dwarf nature's own atomic bomb. The energy briefly unleashed was equal to the radiance of 5 billion Suns. This time-lapse sequence of snapshots compresses nearly one year's worth of Hubble observations into a few seconds.

Lee esta historia en español.