About 11.5 billion years ago, a distant star roughly 530 times larger than our sun died in a cataclysmic explosion that blew its outer layers of gas into the surrounding cosmos, a supernova documented by astronomers in blow-by-blow detail.
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They offered the first glimpse of a supernova cooling rapidly after the initial explosion in a single set of images and the first in-depth look at a supernova so early in the universe's history, when it was less than a fifth its current age. The first image, from about six hours after the initial blast, shows the explosion as starting relatively small and fiercely hot - about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit .The second image is from about two days later and the third from about six days after that. In these two images, the gaseous material ejected from the star is seen expanding outward. In the second image, the explosion is only a fifth as hot as in the first one. In the third image, it is only a tenth as hot as the first.
"The gravity in the galaxy cluster not only bends the light from behind it, but also delays the light travel time because the stronger the gravity, the slower a clock moves," Chen said. "In other words, emission of light from a single source behind the lens can go through multiple paths toward us, and we then see multiple images of the source."
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