WASHINGTON—About 11.5 billion years ago, a distant star roughly 530 times larger than our sun died in a cataclysmic explosion that blew its outer layers of gas into the surrounding cosmos, a supernova documented by astronomers in blow-by-blow detail.
Researchers on Wednesday said NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture three separate images spanning a period of eight days starting just hours after the detonation—an achievement even more noteworthy considering how long ago and far away it occurred.
The images were discovered in a review of Hubble observation archival data from 2010, according to astronomer Wenlei Chen, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature….