
The chance of witnessing two dying stars explode almost at the same time: 1 in 10,000. The chance of witnessing a double dose of supernovae with the correct type of telescope: really, really, really unlikely.
To top it off, there is no way to predict when and where deathly star explosions will happen, and only 1% of stars die in a supernova anyway. The rest fade away into white dwarfs, exhausted and completely out of nuclear fuel.
Nonetheless, Alicia Soderberg, a researcher at Princeton University, managed to beat unbeatable odds when she witnessed a supernova explosion from start to finish, while viewing the leftovers of a supernova in a nearby galaxy.
Soderberg happened to be gazing through NASA's Swift gamma-ray burst satellite,and picked up x-ray signals. The swift satellite is special because it can view X-rays. This is important if you want to spot a supernova: they can only be viewed in the X-ray wavelength.

We often speak of things like stress weighing us down. But when your core has become giant aggregate of iron, I imagine that can get pretty intense. The iron core collapses, and explosion results from a shock wave of particles shooting out of the star shell.
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