Ten Year Old Girl Discovers A Supernova

Kathryn Aurora Gray has become the youngest person to discover a from her home in Fredericton, New Brunswick in Canada.  She discovered it with her father, Paul, who has discovered six supernovae himself.  A family friend of theirs, David Lane, took several pictures of the sky with his telescope for the Grays, who then compared the photos to their earlier photos of the same patches of sky.  Any new lights were checked against known objects like asteroids. A new light spotted by Kathryn was verified to be a new supernova.  At only ten years old, she’s four years younger than the previous youngest supernova discoverer.

Yeah, well, when we were ten we were working 27 hours a day in the gypsum mines and if the canary died you wouldn’t go up for air, you’d eat that lazy, give-upping bird with a side of Quiz Pop popcorn. And our game controllers only had two action buttons, and if you needed to do a third action TOO DAMN BAD but we didn’t complain or kick around all pouty in the mines about it.  No sir, no lollygagging or whinging from our sorry lot, and if one of us fell from exhaustion we’d check his pockets for Garbage Pail Kids, and we were happy!

[via Blastr and Space, and you can watch a really awkward interview at TheDailyWh.at]

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