Jifeng Liu

Dust in space is not just grime: it's the raw material for future stars and planets. But how it is distributed in our galaxy has long been a puzzle: dust is hard to measure directly, and it blocks the light of distant stars. Now astronomers have peered through this veil using data on five million stars: their brightness, color, and precise positions in the sky.

70 days. That's exactly how long the plateau, the steady glow after the blast, lasted for supernova SN 2018gj. Usually, these plateaus stretch a hundred days or more. This short plateau was the first crack in the star's mask. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope pinpointed the progenitor: a red supergiant. Enormous. Cold.

Massive stars end their lives in a grand explosion — a supernova. Their cores collapse into a neutron star (a super-dense ball where a teaspoon of matter weighs a billion tons) or a black hole. For a long time, the most common type of such outbursts was thought to be the domain of solitary stars. However, supernova SN 2018gj broke the rule.

In the dense galaxy cluster Abell 2744, where gravity bends light like a lens, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a new point of light. It appeared in images from 2023 and then began to change brightness. It was a supernova, the explosion of a dying star, but not just any kind: a Type IIP.

An old lighthouse at the edge of the harbor blinks with the precision of a clockwork mechanism. Every few hours its lamp flares and dims, and sailors recognize that rhythm from afar, using the strength of the light to tell where the shore lies.