Teaching tools > Science content reading > Overview: Chasing a supernova > Tales of: Chasing a supernova

Tales of ... An astronomer's adventure: Chasing the light from an ancient supernova See image below

Ten billion years ago, when the universe was in its infancy, an aging star in a corner of space took its last breath. This final gasp was a big one, a titanic supernova explosion that unleashed streams of brilliant light.

As the blazing light traveled through space and across billions of years, Earth and its neighboring planets in the solar system were born and evolved. Humankind arose. Astronauts set foot on the moon. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space. The light was still journeying toward Earth in 1995 when Hubble stared at a tiny speck of sky in the Northern Hemisphere for its farthest look across the cosmos, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF).

Finally, the light from the dying, faraway star did reach Earth in 1997. Astronomers using the Hubble telescope to hunt for distant supernovas caught it while taking a second look at the Hubble Deep Field. The detection was the first of an unlikely string of coincidences leading to important information about the supernova and the universe's behavior 10 billion years ago. These serendipitous events include finding the exploding star buried in two other Hubble telescope observations of the same area, both taken within months of the second "deep field" study. (Continued >>)

Top: The Hubble Deep Field (HDF), 1995, showing where the supernova was found. Lower left: Enlargement from the HDF showing the exploding star's home galaxy, a faint elliptical. Lower right: The supernova, showing up as a white dot in center. Although this stellar explosion is among the brightest beacons in the universe, it could not be seen directly in the Hubble images. The stellar blast is so distant from Earth that its light is buried in the glow of its host galaxy. The red background texture, lower right, is an artifact of the process of isolating the supernova.

Teaching tools > Science content reading > Overview: Chasing a supernova > Tales of: Chasing a supernova