With an uncountable number of stars in the Universe, you'd think their explosive deaths would be fairly common. However, rarely do we get to see the spectacular way these supernova events unfold in the visible spectrum - but that's exactly the treat the Hubble Space Telescope has given us today.
In January 2018, a bright explosion of light was spotted at the outskirts of a galaxy called NGC 2525, 70 million light-years away. In February of 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope turned its
Wide Field Camera 3 in the flash's direction, and started taking pictures.
For an entire year, until February 2019, Hubble continued to take images of the progression of the supernova as it faded over time, until it was no longer visible.
The space telescope just missed the supernova's peak brightness of about 5 billion times the light of the Sun, but it was still gleaming extremely brightly when Hubble tuned in.
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