We traveled 70 million light-years away, when in 2018, the Hubble telescope turned its attention to a corner of our cosmos. Now NASA has released a timelapse of almost a year of observations so that we can see it in all its glory.
The galaxy NGC 2525, where the event occurred, was one of the first to be discovered back in 1791 by William Herschel. Its closeness and beautiful structure make it one of the target galaxies, a favorite among amateur astronomers.
The event, known as SN2018gv, earned an additional allotment of Hubble's precious time because it was a Type Ia supernova, the product of a white dwarf extracting so much material from a neighboring star that it passed the critical mass threshold to explode.
This impressive NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation Lupus (the Wolf), about 60 million light-years from Earth and has been the host of a recent supernova event ( not visible in this last image).
The observation was proposed by Adam Riess, who (along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt) received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 for their contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
