ESO telescope captures supernova event taking place in Cartwheel galaxy

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has shared a new image showing a supernova event taking place in the Cartwheel galaxy that lies 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor.

In the lower-left corner of the right image, a type II supernova event called SN2021afdx is taking place. Captured in December 2021 with ESO's New Technology Telescope (NTT), this event occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its evolution. According to ESO, supernovae can cause a star to shine brighter than its entire host galaxy and can be visible to observers for months, or even years — a blink of an eye on astronomical timescales.

SN2021afdx was spotted for the first time in November 2021 by the ATLAS survey - an asteroid impact early warning system. It was then followed up by ePESSTO+, the advanced Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects. The latter use the EFOSC2 and SOFI instruments on the NTT, located at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile to study objects that are only in the night sky for very short periods of time.

Our latest Picture of the Week shows something interesting taking place in the right image: a supernova. Can you spot it? The image on the left shows the Cartwheel galaxy before this supernova took place.🔗 https://t.co/G9HlYg0TVECredit: @ESO /Inserra et al., Amram et al. pic.twitter.com/XGb9Uc3gc1

— ESO (@ESO) March 7, 2022

The image on the left was captured in August 2014 by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). It shows the Cartwheel galaxy before this supernova event took place.

The cartwheel shape of this galaxy is a result of a head-on interaction with a smaller companion galaxy several million years ago. The bright object in the centre of the image is the galaxy's nucleus.