It must only be UK astronomers who associate NAM with meeting old friends and catching up on science rather than old war movies and Apocalypse Now, but at least this year’s National Astronomy Meeting is starting with a bang. An new image released by a team from our hosts, Queen’s University Belfast, shows a supernova in the galaxy NGC 2397.

The picture includes an image of supernova 2006bc, an explosion that marked the death of a massive star. Unusually, the image includes the supernova while it is still on the rapid climb to maximum brightness; capturing supernovae early is crucial to improving our understanding of these dramatic events. The work of the team at QUB focuses on combing through images taken before the explosion in order to determine the nature of the stars which will end their lives so dramatically. Their hard work seems to show that a stellar mass of just seven times that of the Sun is sufficient to produce such an explosion, but no very massive stars have been identified as supernova precursors. That suggests that these massive stars might be directly collapsing to black holes - an intriguing possibility.