Scientists recently witnessed the explosion of a Type 1a supernova that was born about 9 billion years ago. Type 1a supernovae are a specific kind of white dwarf star that occur only in binary system, in which two bodies are close enough to one another that they display gravitational interaction around the same center. Here’s a snippet from the article and a photo:

The team used the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe the supernova in near-infrared wavelengths over eight months.

“In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in optical light,” said principal investigator Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “But it’s only the beginning of what we can do in infrared light.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), and S. Rodney (The Johns Hopkins University)

Astronomers recently discovered perhaps the coldest known star in our viewable universe. So cold, in fact, that it’s thought to be about the same temperature as a cup of hot tea or about 212 degree Fahrenheit. By star standards, that’s extremely chilly. The Sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit by comparison.

Here’s an article from space.com and a photo:

CREDIT: ESO/L. Calçada - This artist’s impression shows the pair of brown dwarfs named CFBDSIR 1458+10. Observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and two other telescopes have shown that this pair is the coolest pair of brown dwarfs found so far. The two components are both about the same size as the planet Jupiter.