![]() The cluster’s gravity bent and magnified the light. Before the light from that explosion reached the Hubble Space Telescope, it had to pass a cluster of galaxies that sit in Hubble’s line of sight, in the foreground-“foreground,” of course, being a relative term, since the intervening cluster is about five billion light-years from Earth, or about thirty billion trillion miles, and the supernova is nearly twice as distant. There was only one star, and it went supernova only once, about nine billion years ago. This is not, however, some cosmic variant of Schrödinger’s cat, a quantum-physics thought experiment in which a cat in a chamber might conceivably be both dead and alive at the same time. ![]() A team of astronomers is reporting, in the most recent issue of the journal Science, that they have witnessed a single faraway star exploding into a supernova in four different places.
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