Astronomers catch massive star exploding and track supernova for 3 months

In March, a brief flash of X-rays lit up the sky in a distant galaxy. It lasted only moments, but it carried a profound message: a star had just begun to die.That fleeting signal, detected by China’s Einstein Probe space telescope, marked the first sign of a supernova, the explosive death of a massive star, and it gave astronomers an unprecedented opportunity. For the first time in nearly two decades, researchers were able to observe the entire process, from the initial shock breakout to the fading glow of the supernova, tracking the event for almost three months, according to Reuters.The star, located roughly 500 million light-years from Earth, was estimated to be around 30 times more massive than the Sun. At the very end, it was a rare Wolf-Rayet star, a huge and luminous body that had lost its outer layers of hydrogen and helium thru powerful stellar winds.