Schawinksi and his colleagues detected the ultraviolet signal of a hefty star on the verge of explosion, which they detail in the June 13 issue of the journal Science.

Usually, when astronomers see a supernova, the star has already been destroyed. It s very hard to tell much about precisely the kind of star that actually died there, Schawinski told SPACE.com. The really cool thing about our observations is this light traveling ahead of the shock wave traveled through the star before it was destroyed.

He added, It s telling us about the properties, the conditions, of the star at the moment it died, but before the shock wave actually disrupted it.