By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | February 22, 2018 02:35pm ET
On a September night in Argentina, amateur astronomer Victor Buso took his camera outside, mounted it on a 16-inch telescope and trained it on a spiral galaxy some 80 million light-years from Earth. Buso was just trying to test out his new camera. He didn't expect to win the cosmic lottery — or to prove scientists right about a long-held theory about how supernovas occur.
While photographing the NGC 613 galaxy over the course of about an hour, Buso inadvertently captured several images of a star moving through the first visible stages of a supernova — the explosive (and visibly bright) death of a supermassive star. In one photo, the space below the spiral galaxy looked seemingly empty. In the next, a bright blast of light had appeared.
Such photos of emerging supernovas have never been captured before, and with good reason; according to astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata in Argentina, the chances of randomly catching a star going supernova are about 1 in 10 million at best. [The Best Space Photos Ever]
Buso quickly shared his photographic findings with astronomers, and, by the next morning, telescopes around the world took aim at the dying star.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/61843-amateur-first-visible-supernova-photo.html
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