Rare Supernova Rips Open a Star, Revealing Its Hidden Anatomy

On September 6, 2021, Steve Schulze, a researcher at Northwestern University, was on the lookout for fresh supernovas when he came across a strange explosion that left behind an extremely exposed corpse. The dying star had a rather stressful death, stripping down to its stellar bone and exposing its inner layers. “We quickly noticed that this supernova was unlike anything we had seen before,” Schulze told Gizmodo.

As massive stars approach their death, they develop a structure of shells made up of different elements. Those shells are hard to observe, however, since the star’s explosive death mixes the layers together. For the first time, astronomers have been able to see the distinct layers that make up a star through a recently discovered supernova, dubbed 2021yfj—and it is unlike anythi