About every 10 seconds a star explodes somewhere in the universe.

Wow, I have to absorb that! That's not very often given the trillions of stars out there.

And it's far less frequent when considering only one galaxy. In our own Milky Way, an old star goes boom only every 50-100 years...we're lucky if it's on our side of the galaxy so we can see it.

Well, in the past year I've been lucky to see two supernovas. The first was last year near our own Bubble Nebula, in an adjoining spiral arm of the Milky Way. The second, this one, happened just a couple of weeks ago in another galaxy, far, far away (cue music). A star in Galaxy MGC4647 collapsed on itself and exploded with great flare on April 16...and has continued to glow long enough for me to see.

Credit to astronomer Koichi Itagaki for seeing it first and then posting for others to verify.

This is pretty cool. Galaxy NGC4647 is 67 million light years away. It's actually behind the bigger bright object in this picture...Galaxy NGC4649 (57M ly away). The dark streak across the smaller galaxy is probably one of the foreground galaxy's spirals. Both are in our constellation Virgo. 

This is where I'm reminded that the supernova explosion actually occurred that same number of years ago. You know, the space-time continuum thing.

67 million years ago. That's how long the light from this event took to get here. By the time it arrives, only a few photons ae left to hit my scope's mirror. It took more than two hours of exposure to grab enough to make an image.

Yep, this month's explosion actually took place about the same time that an asteroid hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs and most other living things.

Earth was lucky. A supernova would simply vaporize the surface of all of the planets. We won't have to worry about that here for a very, very long time.

So, BOOM, a star reached the end of it's life and exploded so brightly that we can readily see it here with a driveway telescope. Think about that...we are seeing direct evidence of a SINGLE STAR in another galaxy...normally something my telescope would never be able to do. All of the other pin-dot stars in this image are in our own galaxy. We have to look past them to see more distant destinations.

BTW, if you look closely, this slice of sky is full of galaxies. All of these are so far away that we can't make out much...just the brightest center part. My scope fails to see any hint of galaxies after a distance of about 500 million light years.

By contrast, the new James Webb telescope just launched should be able to see 13 BILLION light years away...perhaps make out objects that are still just forming after the creation of the universe itself.

My scope: 8 inches wide. The Webb: 21 feet (and no atmosphere).

Such an energetic event deserves energetic music, and it is so while I write this to jazz pianist David Huntsinger's Stormy Weather.

Image tech info at https://www.astrobin.com/25q83m/0/