Astronomers estimate there are between 300 billion and two trillion galaxies in the universe, each containing about 100 billion stars. When you crunch the numbers, every second across the observable universe about 50 stars are exploding. These are known as supernovas. Most supernovas are in distant galaxies that even the most powerful telescopes have a hard time seeing. Occasionally, though, they’re in a nearby galaxy or even our own Milky Way. People on Earth have been observing them for thousands of years.
But trying to find and understand supernovas has been a huge undertaking. What are they? How do these stars explode, and why? How do we improve ways to find them? These are fundamental questions in our scanning of the universe.
We often view the universe as a very static thing – a place where not much changes, and in which it takes a long time for things to happen.
Wrong. In a matter of seconds, entire star systems can explode. The universe itself is evolving before our eyes.
The Nobel Prize
In 2011, three astronomers – Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter – won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Their two teams, the High-Z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project, used a specific type of supernova,
