For years, scientists have suspected that stars can meet their doom by a one-two punch of back-to-back explosions — but they've never seen visual evidence of this happening. That just changed. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile have taken the first ever image of such a stellar "double-detonation," or more specifically, its grisly but spectacular aftermath called a supernova remnant. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, add to our understanding of burned-out stars called white dwarfs, which our star is eventually fated to become. "The explosions of white dwarfs play a crucial role in astronomy," says […]