Yi Yang, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, had barely touched down in San Francisco from a long flight when his phone started blowing up with alerts. A massive star – all 22 million light years away in the galaxy NGC 3621 – was going out in a blaze of glory at the end. What we now know as SN 2024ggi started lighting up on April the 10th, 2024. Within a few hours, Yang was on the phone to the European Southern Observatory, begging them to get a look at it. And by the next day, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile is swinging round to get a glimpse of the distant supernova explosion.
