Astronomers have captured the death of a star from the very first explosive moments of its demise.
In March earlier this year, the Einstein Probe, an orbiting telescope hunting for high-energy events, spotted a brief flash of X-rays coming from a galaxy 500 million light-years away.
Within hours, ground-based telescopes all over the world had sprung into action, revealing what turned out to be a rapidly brightening supernova.
Now, two teams of researchers have presented the results of their observations, revealing stunning details from one of the universe’s most destructive events.
Both teams independently confirmed that the first faint X-ray flash was something called
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