Hubble Watches Exploding Star Fade Into Oblivion

This is mondo-coolio. The unnamed star is in spiral galaxy NGC 2525 in the southern constellation of Puppis, 70 million light years away. In round numbers that comes to about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Traveling at the speed of an Apollo moon shot, it would take about 975 trillion years to get there.

They weren't watching this star when it exploded but it became so obvious after that they trained the Hubble space telescope on it, which kept track of it's dying for the next year. At peak of supernova, it was 5 billion times brighter than our sun, which is why it's far more visible than anything else in that galaxy. This is time lapse of that event.

And when this event was taking place, dinosaurs still ruled the earth.