Amateur astronomer is first to capture birth of a supernova – and he did it while testing a new camera on his telescope
Scientists estimated that the initial mass of the star was about 20 times great that the mass of our Sun
To say that Victor Buso was in the right place at the right time may be the biggest understatement in the history of stargazing.
By pure luck, the amateur astronomer from Rosario, Argentina snapped the first before-and-after images ever captured of a star as it explodes in a brilliant flash of light and morphs into a supernova.
Astronomers call this pivotal moment “shock breakout”, and have dreamt for decades of witnessing such a stellar metamorphosis in real time.
“In many moments you search and ask yourself, why do I do this?” Buso said via email. This was why: Buso, a self-taught astronomer, had just witnessed the surge of light at the birth of a supernova – something no other human, not even a professional scientist, had seen.
Melina Bersten, a scientist at the La Plata Astrophysics Institute in Argentina and lead author of a study in journal Nature that describes the discovery, put the odds of stumbling across it at up to 1 in 100 million.
“It’s like winning the cosmic lottery,” quipped co-author Alex Filippenko, an astronomer at the University of California Berkeley.