I've been preoccupied with earthly matters lately, so I haven't been keeping abreast of things celestial. That's how I missed this item about astronomers observing the progress of a supernova explosion. Red giant SN 2020tlf flared up and ejected great gouts of gas before collapsing and exploding, a phenomenon never before observed.
The artist's rendering of the process is quite dramatic, as befits a big boom on a cosmic scale:
Here's where I note that I haven't posted on the progress of the James Webb Space Telescope launch, because I wanted to wait until the deployment was a fait accompli. The telescope has come up in various Secret Science Club recaps, though. If our astrophysicists are getting dramatic footage of supernova explosions from earthbound observatories, just imagine what sort of images will be obtained using an extraterrestrial observatory.
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