PASADENA, Calif. -- A supernova, the violent explosion of a star, has been discovered in the eastern portion of the constellation Leo by a California Institute of Technology undergraduate, scientists announced Thursday.
Celina Mikolajczak, 19, discovered the supernova -- named SN 1989N and located in a large spiral galaxy 137 million light years from Earth - on photographs taken on the night of June 29-30 through the 18-inch Schmidt telescope at San Diego's Palomar Observatory.
The discovery 822,000,000,000,000,000,000 quintillion miles -- or a trillion million miles -- from Earth was confirmed by Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planet Center of Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory.
Mikolajczak, an engineering student, made her discovery while working in Caltech's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program under the sponsorship of Eleanor Helin, a planetary scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
'Our project's focus was a search for comets and asteroids,' Mikolajczak said, 'but my fellow student, Andrea Mejia, and I had found no comets at all during our first run at Palomar and only previously known asteroids. So Helin suggested we look for supernovas on our films as well.'
To find a supernova, recently exposed photographic film is compared with films exposed earlier.
The eruption, or supernova, of a star involves a sudden release of energy that, at peak intensity, can outshine the entire galaxy in which it occurs before slowly fading.
Mikolajczak examined galaxies on 15 pairs of film, looking for a bright spot on recent film not present on earlier film.
'I was working on the last of the 15 pairs of films we had exposed, feeling pretty discouraged, when I noticed a bright spot in the recent film that wasn't there in the March 1989 film,' she said.
'My first thought was that it was a speck of dust, so I immediately examined the recent film's pair. When I saw the bright spot was on that film, too, I said to myself, 'Wow, I think I've found something.''
In the June 29-30 films, SN 1989N had a visual magnitude of between 14 and 15, which makes it too dim to be seen by the naked eye. It is unknown at what stage the supernova was discovered to determine whether it will brighten or fade.
According to Marsden, 15 to 20 supernovas are discovered in a typical year. SN 1989N was the 14th to be discovered in 1989. Twenty-seven were found last year.
Despite her discovery, Mikolajczak, a San Diego resident, said she does not intend to switch her major to astronomy.
