The National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA) shared a time-lapse video of an exploding star which was caught on its Hubble Space Telescope, earlier this week. NASA shared the video via its YouTube Account and posted a caption, “A Zoom to Fading Supernova in NGC 2525.” 

The video zooms into a spiral galaxy called NGC 2525. The galaxy is located 70 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Puppis acknowledged NASA.

The NGC 2525 galaxy is around half the diameter of our Milky Way and it was first discovered in the year 1791 by British astronomer William Herschel.

The video depicts the fading light of Supernova 2018gv. The Hubble Telescope did not record the initial blast of the Supernova in 2018, curated a time-lapse video from consecutive image clicked between 2018 and 2019. NASA estimates that at its peak, the exploding star was “as bright as 5 billion suns.”

NASA first started monitoring the supernova in February 2018.

The video was posted along with the message, “This video zooms into the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light-years away in the southern constellation Puppis. Roughly half the diameter of our Milky Way, it was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel in 1791 as a “spiral nebula.” The sharpness of the image increases as we zoom into the Hubble view. As we approach an outer spiral arm a Hubble time-lapse video is inserted that shows the fading light of supernova 2018gv. Hubble didn’t record the initial blast in January 2018, but for nearly one year took consecutive photos, from 2018 to 2019, that have been assembled into a time-lapse sequence. At its peak, the exploding star was as bright as 5 billion Suns.”

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American astronomer Carl Sagan once opined about the human race, “Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

A snapshot from 70 million light-years away.