The Ghosts That Could Change Everything
They appear as nothing more than ghosts — but the secrets they tell may soon revolutionise science.
The first sign was astonishingly brief, just thirteen seconds long. It was so brief, in fact, that until much later nobody realised it had happened at all. But something unusual was indeed happening on that February afternoon, something that hadn’t happened for almost four centuries.
The next sign followed a few hours later, though for some time nobody noticed that one either. A photographer in Australia captured the event on camera, but wouldn’t realise what he had found until the next day. By the time night fell a few hours later in Chile, the sign was bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, if you knew what you were looking for.
Fortunately Ian Shelton did know and was familiar enough with that particular part of the night sky to notice something was off. Before long an army of telescopes and satellites confirmed what he was seeing: for the first time in four hundred years a new star had appeared in the night sky, a marker of one of the most violent events known to mankind.
The event was big news for astronomers, presenting the first opportunity to study a nearby supernova with modern technology. Telescopes and labs around the…
