Loading...Today’s featured video is not a typical Video Shakedown featured video. It’s not made by some YouTuber with over 100,000 subscribers, nor some TED talk or educational video. Instead, today’s featured video is a short, 29-second clip highlighting a recent and very exciting scientific discovery. Just yesterday, the space telescope Kepler happened to be looking at a specific star in the Milky Way when, to the surprise of scientists around the world, we got lucky enough to witness an event that happens fairly rarely: a supernova.
A supernova occurs when a star reaches a certain point in its lifecycle when, for a variety of reasons, it explodes in a spectacular event that makes that star momentarily brighter than the whole galaxy surrounding it. This will eventually happen to every star, although only after it has been around for billions and billions of years. The Kepler telescope capture the footage above, the first video ever taken of a supernova directly in visible light. You may think it’s animated, but it’s not, and it really is a sight to behold.