The explosion of a massive star blazes with the light of 200 million Suns in
this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image, released last week.
The most massive stars end this way, in what astronomers call supernovas. After
the explosion, remaining material collapses into a black hole or neutron star.
This supernova, called SN 2004dj, involved a star that was probably 15 times
as hefty as our Sun, scientists suspect. It was just 14 million years old (our
Sun is 4.6 billion years old and just reaching middle age).
The scene of the explosion is beyond our galaxy in the outskirts of NGC 2403,
a galaxy located 11 million light-years from Earth. Although the supernova is
relatively far from Earth, it is the closest stellar explosion discovered in
more than a decade, astronomers said.
Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered the supernova on July
31, 2004, with a small telescope. The Hubble picture was made Aug. 17.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit: NASA, ESA, A.V. Filippenko (University
of California, Berkeley), P. Challis (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
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