Astronomers have been able to catch the earliest phases of supernova explosions with one of the most powerful observatories on Earth. These incredible observations have provided our first look at what the shape of a supernova is. It turns out, they are not really spherical. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) looked at Supernova SN 2024ggi just 26 hours after it was discovered on April 10, 2024. Yi Yang, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, had detected it, and he was the one to send a proposal to ESO to immediately point the VLT at this event.

The quick turnaround meant that for the first time, we could have a detailed view of the

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