Sep. 27, 2008 Astronomers may have discovered the relative of a
freakishly behaving exploding star once thought to be the only
one of its kind. For more than two decades, astronomers have
intensively studied supernova 1987A, an exploding star that had
behaved like no other. Instead of growing dimmer with time,
1987A has grown brighter at X-ray and radio wavelengths. The
supernova, called SN 1996cr, was first singled out in 2001 by
Franz Bauer. Bauer noticed a bright, variable source in the
Circinus spiral galaxy, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Although the source displayed some exceptional properties Bauer
and his Penn State colleagues could not identify its nature
confidently at the time. It was not until years later that Bauer
and his team were able to confirm that this object was a
supernova. Clues from a spectrum obtained by ESO’s Very Large
Telescope led the team to start the real detective work of
searching through data from 18 different telescopes, both
ground- and space-based, nearly all of w