Well it turns out that big announcement that NASA had today (if you haven’t been following it, there’s been a lot of speculation about it), was not aliens or admittance of fake moon landings, but the youngest supernova ever found in the milky way.

This may seem kind of dull, as there are plenty of supernovas out there to look at, but what makes this interesting is the fact that judging by the rate we see supernovas (outside our galaxy), we should be seeing more young supernovas around us. Based on calculations made, there should be around 10 supernovas in the milky way, that are younger then the (now previously) youngest supernova, Cassiopeia-A, which occured in 1680. This is exactly what they have now observed, a 140 year old supernova called G1.9+0.3 (catchy isn’t it?), observed with the cleverly named “Very Large Array” and the in-orbit x-ray telescope Chandra.

They actually observed the supernova originally over 20 years ago, and it was assumed to be 400-1000 years old. Recently though, they took a second look at it, and saw that it had expanded much more rapidly then they had expected. This lead to them to have a closer look and conclude that it was a lot younger. Check out the picture (courtesy of NASA) for a look at the actual supernova where you can see the remains of the sun expanding. The inner white ring that is superimposed on it, is to show how big it was when it was first observed.

Official NASA press release.