Astronomers have captured a first-of-its-kind image of a massive dying star.

Just 26 hours after the supernova SN 2024ggi was first detected in April 2024, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) pointed its Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile at the dramatic astronomical event. Supernovas are the explosive deaths of stars, and ESO’s VLT managed to capture this one in its earliest moments—just as the blast was rupturing through the star’s surface. This achievement reveals, for the first time, the supernova’s shape at its earliest, ephemeral stage.

This is great news for researchers because “the geometry of a supernova explosion provides fundamental information on stellar evolution and the physical processes leading to these cosmic fireworks,” Yi Yang, an astronomer at Tsinghua Universi

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