Los Angeles Times - May 22, 2008
A pair of young astronomers have captured for the first time the earliest death throes of a supernova, verifying a decades-old theory about how the giant stars commit stellar suicide.
While scanning a galaxy 90 million light-years away, the soon-to-be-married couple noticed a sudden eruption of X-rays from a spot in the constellation Lynx.
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The discovery was the beginning of a frantic quest to confirm the observation.
First, Soderberg, who received her doctorate in astrophysics from Caltech in 2007 and is also a Carnegie-Princeton fellow, drafted a proposal asking for confirmation from the Gemini Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. She also began writing the scientific paper that will be published today in the journal Nature.
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