The supernova remnant Pa 30. Left: infrared; Centre: Infrared (yellow/green), UV (blue), X-ray (contours); Right: optical light. Image credit: Fig 1 of Ritter et al. 2021.

Way back in 1181 AD, astronomers in China and Japan recorded a “guest star” – something that we’d now call a supernova. Over 800 years later, astronomers made a connection between this ancient observation and more recent studies of a very unusual object that goes by the name of “Parker’s Star”.

Prof Quentin Parker, from University of Hong Kong, explains how he and his team made the link, displacing a previously favoured object. And it seems that this was no common or garden supernova, but an incredibly rare “Type 1ax” supernova.