Students and a researcher from the University of London Observatory have discovered one of the closest supernovas to earth in recent decades. Dr. Steve Fossey had actually conducted a 10-minute telescope workshop for the students to look into galaxies and stars, but they discovered the supernova.

Fossey said the weather was becoming very cloudy, so he decided to give students an introductory demonstration of how to use the CCD camera instead of the planned practical class. The students chose M82 as their target because it was in one of the quickly declining patches of clear sky. While adjusting the telescope, Fossey detected a star superimposed on the galaxy. The star was not something he recognized in previous observations.

Fossey and the students started confirming images and spectra of the star that took them much longer than the expected time of the workshop. They also used a second telescope to acquire a second source of data. They wanted to ensure that the star was not an instrumental object.

As no online reports were there about the previous sightings of this object, the team believed that it is was new fleeting source like a supernova. Fossey alerted astronomers worldwide to confirm the discovery.

Astronomers around the world collected the spectra, which suggested that it is a Type Ia supernova. The supernova was triggered by a white dwarf star pulling matter off a larger neighboring star till the time it becomes unstable and explodes.