Nobody gets a chance to see a dying star. It's a rare find to catch sight of a star at a crucial time.
A group of researchers have measured the flash of light from a distant supernova with help from a cluster of galaxies.
They can use the data to test theories about the star's dying light.
The star is so far away that any telescope can't see it. It took over 11 billion years for its light to cross the yawning expanse and arrive on our doorstep.
The changes in the star's glow reveal a few things about its demise. And continued.
There was a mess of starlight somewhere between here and there and it ended up in a knot of hundreds of galaxies 4 billion light years away.
The star's light will bend as it slips through a big hole in the universe caused by the number of galaxies close together.
The effect was similar to that of a giant telescope, one with a scratched and wrinkled lens.
Smeared into a configuration referred to as an Einstein cross, the original light was magnified and copied, creating subtly different versions of the distant galaxy as it appeared at different times.
In a survey of stars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010, a ring of light was discovered. Three of the four points of the cross were revealed by the team with some clever modeling.
The swelling glow of an exploding star was revealed by an analysis of the light within each smudge. The light appeared six hours after the burst.
Taken as a whole, the three blurs of light show details of the supernova slowly cooling over the course of a week.
There are dying stars of a certain size. Depleted of the atomic fuel to stoke their fires, they cool just enough for their core to collapse with a fury that causes the mother of all nuclear explosions.
Researchers are slowly making process on knowing when a star will explode. It takes a lot of luck to catch a star in the moment it dies.
The signature flash of a dying star in a galaxy far, far away, as well as vital details on the changes in its light over a short period, were found here.
It helps confirm models on how the material surrounding stars interacts with the burst of radiation from within, heating in a blink before quickly cooling again, allowing them to determine the star's original size from how it cools.
The team believes the star they saw in its dying moments had a radius more than 500 times that of our own Sun.
The study supports theories on the evolution of supernovae and the stars that produce them, as well as opening the way to analyze a whole new population of stars from the early Universe.
It's as close to an invitation of a star's last moments as we can get.
The research was published in a journal.
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