On this day in space! Nov. 6, 1572: Tycho supernova discovered

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On Nov. 5, 2002, NASA's old Galileo spacecraft was almost out of fuel.

On Nov. 6, 1572, the German astronomer Wolfgang Schulër observed a supernova with his bare eyes. He spotted the exploding star in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was as bright as Venus and could even be seen during the day.

Astronomers were really confused, because it looked like a star just appeared out of nowhere. Schulër may have been the first to see it, but the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is widely credited for the discovery. Brahe studied it in detail and wrote a whole book about this so-called "new star." It then became known as "Tycho's Star."

Gamma rays detected by NASA's Fermi space telescope show that the remnant of Tycho's supernova shines in the highest-energy form of light. This portrait of the shattered star includes gamma rays (magenta), X-rays (yellow, green, and blue), infrared (red) and optical data. (Image credit: Gamma ray, NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration; X-ray, NASA/CXC/SAO; Infrared, NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical, MPIA, Calar Alto, O. Krause et al. and DSS)

At the time, supernovas had not yet been discovered. Tycho's Star was finally classified as a supernova in the 1940s. Scientists now think it was a small star called a white dwarf that exploded thousands of years ago. Because Tycho's Star is 13,000 light-years from Earth, it took a while before anyone could see it.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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