Star Light, Star Bright

Scientists have just witnessed, for the first time, the collapse of a star into a black hole or super dense object (i.e. neutron star).  Their sighting, aptly nicknamed the Cow, was discovered on a routine search for transients at the Keck Observatory. 

The find was very surprising because it was 10 to 100 times brighter than the average supernova.  The object reached its peak brightness in two days.  Just to understand how rare this is, the average supernova takes about two weeks to reach its peak brightness.  The reason why this happened might be due to the fact that something was absorbing the bubbling material that usually accompanies the explosion and blocks our view.  Whatever it was, possibly a black hole or another dense object, it gave the observatory an excellent view and massive amounts of data.

There is still a lot more data to collect, and they will find out in about a week or so.  That will be around the time when the observatory will have the best view and see what this actually develops into.  This will give scientists the most recent account of what happens after a supernova, which they have only seen thousands of years later.  This is a very important discovery, and I can’t wait to see the data that is collected from this amazing find.