NASA Captures Time-Lapse Of A Supernova Five Times Brighter Than The Sun
Video screenshot via NASA
NASA has captured a magnificent supernova via its Hubble Space Telescope in a time-lapse video recorded over the span of a year.
The space agency teamed up with the European Space Agency to measure the universe’s expansion rate via the time-lapse footage.
Though supernovas occur at a rate of approximately one per second, the giant space telescope managed to catch the stars visibly fading.
The telescope monitored the white dwarf star in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, 70 million light-years away from Earth since January 2018 when astronomer Koichi Itagaki noticed that it was heading towards the point of a supernova.
“This pileup of gas eventually triggered a runaway thermonuclear explosion, making the dwarf nature’s own atomic bomb,” NASA said about the celestial event. “The energy briefly unleashed was equal to the radiance of five billion Suns.”
[via Happy Magazine, cover image via NASA]
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