Wednesday, February 10, 2016

SUPERNOVA SN 2016 ADJ IN CENTAURUS A Taken by Tom Harradine on February 11, 2016 @ Brisbane, Australia




A couple of days ago, a supernova (massive exploding star) was discovered in the galaxy Centaurus A, 15 million light years away, by Peter Marples and Greg Bock. This morning in Brisbane, I took some images of it and compared it to images I took last year. You can see the new star as an orange-coloured object just next to a Milky Way foreground star. The colour is most likely due to the supernova occuring within the lane of dust that you can see stretching across the galaxy. This dust reddens the star, much like the Sun is reddened at sunset because of dust in our own atmosphere.




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