First Discovery of a Binary Companion for a Type 1a Supernova
The blue-white dot at the center of this image is supernova 2012cg, seen by the 1.2-meter telescope at Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory. At 50 million light-years away, this supernova is so distant that its host galaxy, the edge-on spiral NGC 4424, appears here as only an extended smear of purple light.
Image by Peter Challis / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics