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A billion years ago, something in the whirling darkness of space erupted with a fury that obscured the glow of entire galaxies. Eventually, the light from that cataclysm reached Earth, and in November 2016, it was captured by a group of intrepid humans at the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. They found that the conflagration wasn’t just unfathomably energetic, but, like a lonely bonfire, it kept on burning, dimming so slowly that its glow can still be seen years after it began.
This wasn’t a typical supernova, the fireworks at the end of a massive star’s life. This event came from a star so gigantic — at least 100 times the mass of our own sun — that its death was unlike almost anything scientists had ever seen. Stars this big were probably common in the early universe, but they have become exceedingly rare. Even its location was odd; it appeared 54,000 light-years away from the nexus of its dwarf galaxy, far from anywhere you might hope to find a mysterious flash.
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A billion years ago, something in the whirling darkness of space erupted with a fury that obscured the glow of entire galaxies. Eventually, the light from that cataclysm reached Earth, and in November 2016, it was captured by a group of intrepid humans at the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. They found that the conflagration wasn’t just unfathomably energetic, but, like a lonely bonfire, it kept on burning, dimming so slowly that its glow can still be seen years after it began.
This wasn’t a typical supernova, the fireworks at the end of a massive star’s life. This event came from a star so gigantic — at least 100 times the mass of our own sun — that its death was unlike almost anything scientists had ever seen. Stars this big were probably common in the early universe, but they have become exceedingly rare. Even its location was odd; it appeared 54,000 light-years away from the nexus of its dwarf galaxy, far from anywhere you might hope to find a mysterious flash.
