Astronomers have recorded the birth of a supernova

Scientists have witnessed the death of a red dwarf for the first time in history.

Astronomers from Berkeley University in California have managed to film the entire process of a red dwarf transforming into a supernova. Despite the billions of stars in the Universe, scientists have recorded this phenomenon for the first time ever. Their attention was on the celestial body SN 2020tlf, located in the galaxy NGC 5731, 120 million light-years away from Earth.

It all began in the summer of 2020 when the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii detected a strong stream of light. Then, in the autumn of that year, the LRIS spectrometer identified a powerful burst of radiation from dense stellar material, indicating a supernova's birth.

The transformation of a star into a supernova is when a celestial body contracts under its own gravity. When stars are eight to fifteen times heavier than the Sun, this occurs when their "energy" dies, which results in lighter objects becoming white dwarfs, too heavy to become black holes.