Threading a cosmic needle: A fleeting glimpse of a dying star's final moments

As an astronomer, I'm used to events in deep space happening on time scales on millions if not billions of years.

But sometimes things happens much faster than that. Sometimes even on human timescales. That's the blink of an eye on a cosmic timescale, which makes the odds of catching an event like that really low. Unless, that is, there are lots of objects doing it, in which case you might, might have a shot.

There are a lot of stars.

When a star up to eight or nine times the Sun's mass dies,...