Supernovae are rare events, yet they are critical to the inner workings of our universe and even our own biological makeup. The calcium that makes up our teeth and bones originated from these massively fascinating events, which are the final moments of dying stars. As the late Carl Sagan famously said in an episode of Cosmos: "The lives and deaths of the stars seem impossibly remote from the human experience, and yet we're related in the most intimate way to their life cycles." Despite this, there remains a lot of mystery around these super-powerful explosions that shape our world and universe.
To date, scientists have felt confident that two basic types of supernovae exist which are each characterized by their presence of hydrogen. But for decades, astrophysicists have been perplexed by the fact that there are more “hydrogen-poor supernovae” than science could explain, in part because they hadn’t been able to identify the missing original star population behind these events. The perplexing mystery, and unexplainable phenomenon, put the theoretical models at risk for being inaccurate.
