For the first time ever, scientists have managed to see a star going supernova in visible light. The Kepler space telescope captured two exploding stars in 2011. At that time, explosion of two red supergiants took place in what are known as Type II supernovae.

Type II supernovae occur when the core of the star collapses and explodes violently in fast succession. Such kind of explosion’s shockwaves or shock breakout lasts just around 20 minutes due to which recording one of the events is a remarkable achievement for astronomy.

Headed by astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, the international team looked for supernovae within Kepler data. They studied data collected over a time period of three years, wherein Kepler clicked pictures every 30 minutes, covered more than 500 galaxies and 50 trillion stars.

Their search was successful with the discovery of KSN 2011a and KSN 2011d. The supernovae KSN 2011a was noticed nearly 700 million light-years away, with a star roughly 300 times the sun’s size. KSN 2011d has been recorded 1.2 billion light-years away, with a star that was nearly 500 times the size of the sun. The Astrophysical Journal will publish the research paper, which can be read in full on arXiv.

Garnavich said in a statement, “To see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like shock breakout, you want to have camera continuously monitoring sky. You don't know when supernova is going to go off, and Kepler's vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began”.

Both the supernovae demonstrated similar energy levels, and were quite near to the mathematical models for Type II supernovae, but it was just KSN 2011d, after which a shock breakout took place.