Pop Science
SPACE & PHYSICS
Astronomers watch a star explode in real time
A NASA probe has entered the Sun’s atmosphere and ‘touched’ the blazing corona in a first for solar science.
Astronomers watched a giant star blow up in a fiery supernova for the first time ever, and the spectacle was even more explosive than researchers anticipated. Scientists began watching the doomed star, a red supergiant now designated SN 2020tlf, located about 120 million light years from Earth, more than 100 days before its final violent collapse.
During that lead-up, the researchers saw the star erupt with bright flashes of light as great globs of gas exploded out of the star’s surface. These pyrotechnics came as a
