Astronomers saw a distant supernova less than 6 hours after it blew up

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The core of a massive star exploded after running out of fuel and collapsing in on itself. Astronomers have been able to figure out the properties of the original star thanks to the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

When they were looking through archival Hubble data, they found this supernova. It was visible because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which the gravity from a massive object acts as a magnifying glass for the light behind it.

The light from the supernova is duplicated in the Hubble picture. When light is dragged in multiple directions around the foreground object, it creates multiple pictures of the background object. snapshots of multiple stages of the supernova's evolution can be seen in the images because the light must travel a different distance on each path.

There is a faint blue spot of light growing and becoming brighter and red. The expansion and cooling of the stellar material is being watched. The first image was released about 5.8 hours after the supernova began, the second about two days later and the third about six days after that.

The researchers were able to calculate that the supernova cooled from over 100,000C to less than 10,000C.

Massive stars that burn up quickly compared to stars with less mass are called core-collapse supernovae. The formation rate of massive stars should be tracked. We may be able to learn more about how star formation works in the early universe if we study supernovae like this one. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to peer into the early universe thanks to its ability to peer deep.

The journal's title is " Nature."