© W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam MakarenkoAn artist's depiction of a red supergiant star within the last year before it explodes.
It's much easier for scientists to see the messy aftermath of stellar explosions than to watch the prelude to the drama.
But finally, astronomers managed to observe a red giant star just as it "went supernova," as exploding stars are called. Using a telescope in Hawaii, a team of scientists gathered observations of a red supergiant star in summer 2020. Lo and behold, in September, that very same
star died in a supernova dubbed (SN) 2020tlf — an explosion that team members called "one of the most intriguing" supernovas of its type.
"This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die," Wynn Jacobson-Galán, an astronomy National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of California Berkeley and lead author of a new study reporting the results, said in
a statement from the Keck Observatory, where the team gathered observations. "For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!"
Comment: Another recent study revealed that Earth's magnetosphere can create water on the surface of the moon.
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