The Zwicky Transient Facility recently discovered a star-going supernova in a field the TESS planet hunter just happened to be observing. Recognizing a unique opportunity to catch a supernova going off in a field that was being actively observed in the time leading up to the blast, the Hubble Space Telescope was pulled off its normal planned set of observations and directed at this special event.

The supernova went off in the Butterfly Galaxies – a beautiful pair of merging systems located about 60 million light-years away. The fact this is such a scientifically interesting merger – one that just happens to also be stunningly beautiful – means that there are observations of this system and the star that went supernova going all the way back to the 1990s. 

This combination of historic data taken multiple times with Hubble over thirty years and data from TESS taken every thirty minutes in the days leading up to the discovery, combined with Hubble data taken right after the supernova went off led the research team to dub this object, officially named SN2020fqv “the Rosetta Stone of Supernovae”. 

According to observer Ryan Foley: We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star. This is a different situation, because we really know what’s going on and we actually see the death in real-time. … This is really the most detailed view of stars like this in their last moments and how they explode. 

These observations may even allow us to develop an early warning system to identify the next star that is about to die.

More Information

NASA Goddard press release

“Progenitor and close-in Circumstellar Medium of Type II Supernova 2020fqv from high-cadence photometry and ultra-rapid UV spectroscopy,” Samaporn Tinyanont et al., 2021 October 26, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society