Supernove caught on film for the first time
Wired News: Star Burst Caught in Real Time
For the first time, scientists have observed the spectacular death of a massive star in real time.
Because the supernova lasted for nearly 40 minutes, NASA's Swift satellite was able to turn its lens towards the explosion to observe the star's slow death.
"Usually these gamma ray bursts last fractions of a second to a couple hundred seconds," said Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "This lasted many thousands of seconds.
"The Swift satellite finds these things as soon as they go off, but the longer they last the more we can watch in real time, and others can turn their telescopes to it in real time. This is a weird object (that has generated) four papers in Nature." The papers appear in the Aug. 31 issue.
