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 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Astronomers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way galaxy, still just a baby at 140 years old. The scientists, who announced their findings Wednesday, used a radio observatory in New Mexico and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space to identify when the supernova, or stellar, explosion occurred. They put the star-dying event at sometime around 1868.
Before this, the youngest supernova in the Milky Way was thought to have occurred around 1680.
A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a star that releases an extraordinary amount of energy, enough to outshine an entire galaxy.
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