ScienceDaily - Dec. 18, 2007
When a shot is fired, one expects to see a person with a gun. In the same way, whenever a giant star explodes, astronomers expect to see a galaxy of stars surrounding the site of the blast. This comes right out of basic astronomy, since almost all stars in our universe belong to galaxies. But a stellar explosion seen last January has shocked astronomers because when they looked for the star’s parent galaxy, they saw nothing at all. The explosion took place in the middle of nowhere, far away from any detectable galaxy...
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Using the team's robotic 60-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory in Calif., the astronomers discovered that the burst had a bright afterglow that was fading fast. They observed the afterglow in detail with two of the world's largest telescopes, the Gemini North telescope and the Keck I telescope, both near the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea.
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