Lighting a Cosmic Fuse

PETER NUGENT KNEW HE HAD TO ACT FAST. It was a little past noon on August 24, 2011, and he was sifting through images of the previous night’s sky when he discovered a new point of light: a young supernova explosion. While the explosion was only 12½ hours old, it was already so bright that it outshone the nearby stars in its galaxy and so large that its ballooning debris cloud would easily fill a volume equal to the orbit of Saturn.

Nugent checked the time of the image and saw that another 16 hours had already passed. He dashed to the phone.

Some 20 minutes later, a colleague swung a telescope in the Canary Islands toward the blast and shot a spectrum. The speedy observations told Nugent (University of California, Berkeley) that the supernova had surged in brightness: It was now five times more luminous than it was in the discovery images. It had also doubled in size, the debris cloud now large enough to fill the orbit of Uranus.

But perhaps the most exciting characteristic of the ‘new star’ was that it sat within the spiral arms of the Pinwheel Galaxy, a mere 21 million light-years away. Catching a supernova so soon after the explosion was rare, but catching an early supernova so close was the chance of a lifetime.

Nugent spent the next 36 hours awake, convincing those running space- and ground-based telescopes to observe the supernova. As night’s shadow swept from the Atlantic across North America, Lick Observatory and the CARMA radio array peered at the new star. Then, as darkness continued farther west and hit the Pacific Ocean, the Gemini North Observatory and the Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i swung their mirrors in its direction. In all, seven observatories imaged the supernova that first night. In the days and weeks that followed, SN 2011fe became the