Supernova Shelton

We worked our way through trays of food and chocolate-dipped strawberries, bottle after bottle of Chilean wine, and ended up closing the party we’d crashed—accidentally, really—just following the crowd from a public “Supernova Celebration” the university had mounted in an effort to strengthen their claim on the naming rights to SN 1987a, to lobby government support for their foundering observatory, to fete the unassuming grad student who’d been looking there anyway and was only lucky enough to be first on the phone to the proper authorities…to toast a sun that had died more than 160,000 years ago.

Image source: Space Fellowship