"Core-collapse supernovae mark the deaths of massive, short-lived stars. They found that there were likely many more supernovae than previously thought. The researchers combined this discovery with another one of Kelly's supernova discoveries from 2014 to estimate how many stars were exploding when the universe was a small fraction of its current age. It enables us to see a rerun of a supernova." We see the supernova rapidly cooling, which allows us to basically reconstruct what happened and study how the supernova cooled in its first few days with just one set of images. Even though they can be seen at the same time, they show the supernova as it was at different ages separated by several days. "The gravitational lens acts as a natural magnifying glass and multiplies Hubble's power by a factor of eight," Kelly said. Panels A-D (clockwise from upper left) show several different stages of the supernova: the location of the host galaxy after the supernova faded, the three images of the host galaxy and the supernova at different phases in its evolution, the three different faces of the evolving supernova, and the different colors of the cooling supernova. This magnifies the light emitted from the star. Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope with follow-up spectroscopy using the University of Minnesota's access to the Large Binocular Telescope, the researchers were able to identify multiple detailed images of the red supergiant because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where mass, such as that in a galaxy, bends light. The red supergiant in question was about 500 times larger than the sun, and it's located at redshift three, which is about 60 times farther away than any other supernova observed in this detail. "It's very exciting because we can learn in detail about an individual star when the universe was less than a fifth of its current age, and begin to understand if the stars that existed many billions of years ago are different from the ones nearby." "This is the first detailed look at a supernova at a much earlier epoch of the universe's evolution," said Patrick Kelly, a lead author of the paper and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy.
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