Keep your eyes peeled for the next 50 years.

• Position: Supernova

Astronomers have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth. The good news: they have calculated the odds to be nearly 100% that such a supernova would be visible to telescopes in the form of infrared radiation. The bad news: the odds are much lower--dipping to 20% or less--that the shining stellar spectacle would be visible to the naked eye in the nighttime sky.

Yet, all of this is great news to astronomers, who, unlike the rest of us, have high-powered infrared cameras to point at the sky at a moment's notice. For them, this study suggests that they have a solid chance of doing something that never has been done before: detect a supernova fast enough to witness what happens at the very beginning of a star's demise. A massive star "goes supernova" at the moment when it has used up all of its nuclear fuel and its core collapses, just before it explodes violently and throws off most of its mass into space.

"We see all these stars go supernova in other galaxies, and we don't fully understand how it happens. We think we know; we say we know; but that's not actually 100% true," notes Christopher Kochanek, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Observational Cosmology whose study appears in The Astrophysical Journal. "Today, technologies have advanced to the point that we can learn enormously more about supernovae if we can catch the next one in our galaxy and study it with all our available tools."

First through calculations and then through computer models, generations of astronomers have worked out the physics of supernovae based on all available data, and today's best models appear to match what is seen in the skies. However, actually witnessing a supernova--that is, for instance, actually measuring the changes in infrared radiation from start to finish while it is occurring--could prove or disprove those ideas.

Kochanek explains how technology is making the study of Milky Way supernovae possible. Astronomers now have sensitive detectors for neutrinos (particles emitted from the core of a collapsing star) and gravitational wavesb (created by the vibrations of the star's core), which can find any supernova occurring in our galaxy. The question is whether we actually can see light from the supernova because we...