Amateur astronomer tries out new camera, catches supernova at its start

Enlarge / The dot in the lower-right foreground is the supernova, from an image taken by an amateur astronomer. (credit: Víctor Buso and Gastón Folatelli)

Back in 2016, an astronomy enthusiast named Víctor Buso decided it was a good night to test a new camera on his telescope. The test went well enough that hardware in space was redirected to image what he spotted, and Buso now has his name on a paper in Nature.

Lots of amateurs, like Buso, have spotted supernovae. That typically leads to a search of image archives to determine when the last time a specific location was imaged when the supernova wasn't present—this is often years earlier. Buso didn't have to search, because his first batch of images contained no sign of the supernova. Then 45 minutes later, it was there, and the supernova continued to brighten as he captured more pictures. Buso had essentially captured the moment when the explosion of a supernova burst out of the surface of a star, and the analysis of the follow-on observations was published on Wednesday.

It went boom

The odd thing about many supernova (specifically those in the category called type II) is that they're not explosions in the sense of the ones we experience on Earth. In a supernova, the core of the star collapses suddenly, triggering the explosion. But it happens so quickly that the outer layers of the star barely budge. The first overt sign of what's going on comes when the debris of the explosion reaches the surface of the star, a process called the breakout. This causes the star to suddenly brighten, a process that continues through some ups and downs for days afterward.