“This is one of the very first novae that’s ever been recovered with certainty based on the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese records of almost 2,500 years ago.” 

“With this plate, we managed to figure out how much the star has moved in the century since the image was taken,” Shara said. “Then what we did was traced it back six centuries, and bingo, it was right there, right at the center of our cosmic shell. That’s the clock, that’s what convinced us that it had to be right.”

“In the same way that an egg, a caterpillar, a pupa, and a butterfly are all life stages of the same organism, we now possess strong evidence that supports the idea that these binary stars are all the same thing seen in different phases of their lives,” Shara said. “The real challenge here is understanding the evolution of these systems is that unlike watching the egg transform into the eventual butterfly, which can happen in just a month, the life-cycle of a nova is hundreds of thousands of years. We simply haven’t been around long enough to see a single complete cycle. The breakthrough was being able to reconcile the 580-year-old Korean recording of this event to the dwarf nova and Nova shell that we see in the sky today.”

“This was one of the earliest catches ever – within a day, perhaps even hours, of its explosion,” said Sand in a statement. “In a galaxy like our Milky Way, a supernova goes off, on average, about once per century. We were fortunate to see this phenomenon that never had been observed before.”

“We've been looking for this effect – a supernova crashing into its companion star – since it was predicted in 2010,” added lead author Griffin Hosseinzadeh, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Hints have been seen before, but this time the evidence is overwhelming. The data are beautiful!”

“If we get them really young, we can get a better idea of these processes, which hold implications for our understanding of the cosmos, including dark energy.”

“The current idea is that a low-metal environment is important in creating superluminous supernovae, and that’s why they tend to occur in low mass galaxies, but DES15E2mlf is in a relatively massive galaxy compared to the typical host galaxy for superluminous supernovae,” Yen-Chen Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California Santa Cruz and first author of the paper, said in a statement on the university’s website.

“It’s important simply to know that very massive stars were exploding at that time. What we really want to know is the relative rate of superluminous supernovae to normal supernovae, but we can’t yet make that comparison because normal supernovae are too faint to see at that distance. So we don’t know if this atypical supernova is telling us something special about that time 10 billion years ago,” Ryan Foley, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the university and another lead author of the paper, said in the statement.

“Although many puzzles remain, the ability to observe these unusual supernovae at such great distances provides valuable information about the most massive stars and about an important period in the evolution of galaxies.”

"We still don't really understand the process by which a star explodes as a supernova. These findings are raising new questions, for example, about the final trigger that tips the star from merely unstable to explosive. With our globe-spanning collaboration that enables us to alert various telescopes to train their sights on the event, we are getting closer and closer to understanding what happens in that instant, how massive stars end their life and what leads up to the final explosion." says Ofer Yaron, with the Weizmann Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics team.

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"We had x-rays, ultraviolet, four spectroscopic measurements from between six and ten hours post-explosion to work with," says Yaron.

Collaborative effort