However, its beauty comes from a violent event that happened, luckily, at great distances from Earth.
The most massive stars end their days in a very special way: exploding violently. They are those stars that are born with masses greater than eight times the mass of the Sun and that, when exploding, can shine beyond their own galaxy.
The images that we usually observe and that are really spectacular are produced by the expulsion of matter from the star at very high speed, leaving a very small and compact nucleus in the center.
Supernovae have surprised humans since ancient times and references to visualizations have been found in different parts of the world for hundreds of years. From the first reference to an explosion of this type in the year 185 to the one observed by Kepler and used by Galileo to demonstrate the non-immutability of the sky or the famous explosion of a supernova in Cassiopeia observed by the Spanish Jerónimo Muñoz and one of the parents of astronomy, Tycho Brahe.
