NASA Hubble Video Shows The Death Of An Exploding Star

Today NASA's got a time-lapse video ready to roll to show the tail end of an exploding star. This video includes a whole lot of data and imagery captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing views from as far back as the year 2018. This imagery shows the fading of the light of a supernova in the spiral galaxy know as NGC 2525.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured what they described as the "quick, fading celebrity status of a supernova, the detonation of a star." This star was located approximately 70 million light-years away from our own vantage point here on Earth.

The supernova's name is SN 2018gv, designated as such with the letters SN for supernova and 2018 for its observation by Hubble in February of 2018. The time-lapse imagery you see of this supernova fade took place from February of 2018 all the way to February of 2020.

This supernova was first detected by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki in January of the year 2018. Thanks to the note from Koichi Itagaki, Hubble was able to seek out and record the dying of this star, whose peak (exploding) brightness was the that of 5 billion of our own Sun. This might remind you of the other very recent encounter we had with a planet very near a very bright star – straight out of the Twilight Zone!

"No Earthly fireworks display can compete with this supernova, captured in its fading glory by the Hubble Space Telescope," said Adam Riess. Riess hails from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, leader of the High-z Supernova Search Team and the Supernovae H0 for the Equation of State (SH0ES) Team to measure the universe's expansion rate.

Credit for the observation and creation of this imagery go to NASA, ESA, and A. Riess (STScI/JHU) and the SH0ES team; with additional acknowledgment to M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble).