US space agency NASA has shared a timelapse video of an exploding star that was captured through the lens of its Hubble Telescope. The video shows the star exploding and fading into nothingness in a matter of seconds. The video shows a series of photographs taken of the star over a year or more and one can see the star shining the brightest around every other celestial body around. It eventually is rendered as just a tiny dot and fades away into nothing.
“This video zooms into the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light-years away in the southern constellation Puppis. Roughly half the diameter of our Milky Way, it was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel in 1791 as a “spiral nebula,” reads the description of the video shared by NASA. This exploding star has been called a ‘Type Ia’ supernova, This means that it was the result of a white dwarf gathering large amounts of material from a neighboring star. A white dwarf is a small dense star that is reaching the end of its life cycle. A supernova, for the uninitiated, is a powerful and bright stellar explosion that occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star. The Hubble telescope had discovered the supernova, which is 70 million light-years away in 2018. Its brightness is 5 billion times that of the Sun. Astronomers called the sighting as special because most of the supernovas occur billions of light-years away and astronomical events happening at such great distances are usually very difficult to capture through even the very advanced telescopes.
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