This is a rendering of what a really large star going supernova might look like.  The area in white is the explosion of a star of unusually large size.  The orange portions are gasses and the yellow portion is where the fragments of the star are colliding and heating the gas rapidly.  This image was created to give a visual representation of what SN 2006gy might have looked like.  At the time in 2006, this was the brightest and most powerful supernova on record.

Astronomers, astrophysicists and other researchers around the world are constantly trying to find supernovae occurring in the universe.  Scientists at California colleges and universities have made many discoveries and breakthroughs in the study of supernovae.  If you look up public records in California you will find that in 2011 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers from UC Berkeley, John Hopkins University and the Australian National University for their work on type 1a supernovae and dark energy.  The cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics programs at the California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara consistently rank among the best in the country.

Most people that are interested in supernovae use whatever telescopes they can get access to, but researchers at certain colleges and universities are able to access specialized telescopes like NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. It’s a telescope that orbits the Earth and that has a specialized purpose of being able to observe X-ray emissions from supernovae, clustered galaxies and the materials around black holes.

In 2012, NASA launched NuSTAR, an orbiting telescope that can focus light in the high energy X-ray spectrum.  The telescope is also able to detect X-ray activity and will automatically aim at supernovae and other explosions involving gamma rays.  This telescope is a significant development for astronomers and required a great deal of collaboration between leading researchers at several universities and NASA.  Hopefully we will have access to a telescope one day that will provide an actual image of a star going supernova instead of having to create a rendering.

SN SCP-0401 is not just far away either.  It has a very detailed spectrum and has excellent color measurement with a redshift of 1.71.  These features make this supernova an excellent one for gathering data on.  Researchers will study how the exploding star might have affected the universe over the 10 billion years since it went supernova.

The Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) at Berkeley Lab used the Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery.  SN SCP-0401 was originally spotted in 2004, but it was so far away that a new camera had to be installed to even see it.  That camera was installed in 2009 and the team at SCP was able to get a good view of SN SCP-0401 in January of 2013.

Scientists working on the project poured over several years of data collected by the Fermi Telescope on supernova remnants W44 and the Jellyfish Nebula (pictured above).  Researchers found that charged particles within a supernova remnant would continue to gain speed until they had enough speed to escape the magnetic field of the remnant.  When they escape the charged particles are moving so fast that they are referred to as a cosmic ray.

Amazingly, physicist Enrico Fermi postulated in 1949 that high speed cosmic rays were sped up in the magnetic fields of interstellar gas clouds.  Since then, scientists have focused on supernova remnants as a possible candidate for this process.

Over 60 years later, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has proven Enrico Fermi’s thinking to be true.

Stephen Reynolds over at North Carolina State University and a team of astronomers have been busy using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Telescope to create some amazing images of supernova.  The one of the Kepler remnant (pictured above) was released in 2007.

They definitively determined that Kepler was a Type Ia supernova.  They were able to come to that conclusion based on the amount of oxygen and iron that was present in the remnant.

Kepler is roughly 13,000 light-years away from Earth and it has been the focus of many studies by astronomers.

In 2008, the age of G1.9+0.3 was estimated at around 140 years.  This makes it about 200 years younger than Cassiopeia A which was previously the youngest supernova in the Milky Way.  G1.9+0.3 was not visible from Earth due to space dust and gas that obscured the view.

G1.9 +0.3 is approximately 25,000 light-years away from Earth.  At 140 years old, it should probably hold the title of youngest supernova in our galaxy for quite a long time.

G1.9+0.3 is estimated to be 140 years old where as Cassiopeia A is estimated to be about 340 years old.  G1.9+0.3 is estimated to be roughly 26,000 light-years away whereas Cassiopeia A is around 11,000 light-years away.

Unfortunately, there are no historical records of either supernova being observed on Earth.  There was too much space dust to be able to see G1.9+0.3 when it occurred and the same reason might have been true for keeping Cassiopeia A from being observed.

Either way, there is a new youngest supernova in town for astronomers to get excited about.