Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

48 ASTRO PUBLISHING Hubble gives unprecedented, early view of a supernova by NASA/ESA / Ann Jenkins L ike a witness to a violent death, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently gave as- tronomers an unprecedented, com- prehensive view of the first mo- ments of a star’s cataclysmic demise. Hubble’s data, combined with other observations of the doomed star from space- and ground-based tel- escopes, may give astronomers an early warning system for other stars on the verge of blowing up. “We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene in- vestigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star,” explained Ryan Foley of the Univer- sity of California, Santa Cruz, the leader of the team that made this discovery. “This is a different situa- tion, because we really know what’s going on and we actually see the death in real time.” The supernova, called SN 2020fqv, is in the interacting Butterfly Galax- ies, which are located about 60 mil- lion light-years away in the constel- lation Virgo. It was discovered in April 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. Astronomers realized that the su- pernova was simultaneously being observed by the Transiting Exo- planet Survey Satellite (TESS), a S upernova 2020fqv in NGC 4568. [NASA, ESA, Ryan Foley (UC Santa Cruz)]