On Sept. 20, 2016, Victor Buso, an amateur astronomer in Rosario, Argentina, was just checking out his new camera on his telescope. He was taking pictures of a nearby spiral galaxy when a star within it went off in a supernova explosion. The New York Times writes that within hours, prompted by Buso’s good fortune, professional astronomers around the world pulled out their own telescopes and look at the galaxy, known as NGC 613, about 80 million light-years from here in the constellation Sculptor. It is rare that astronomers get to see the beginning of a supernova, which is when one of the biggest stars in the universe ends its life in one of the most violent ways. It is so rare to see because most supernovas are far away and don’t call attention to themselves until the explosion already happened. But because of Buso, astronomers were able to see what is called the “breakout,” or when a shock wave radiates “from a star’s core, which has probably collapsed into a black hole, reaches the surface of the poor star and brightens it catastrophically,” writes the Times.
“It’s like winning the cosmic lottery,” said Alex Filippenko, in a news release from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where Dr. Filippenko, of the University of California, Berkeley, has been tracking the supernova, according to The Times. They suspect the original star had probably been about 20 times as big as the sun.
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