From WaPo:
The moment he saw the brilliant light captured by his camera, “it all clicked” for Victor Buso: All the times his parents woke him before sunrise to gaze at the stars, all the energy he had poured into constructing an observatory atop his home, all the hours he had spent trying to parse meaning from the dim glow of distant suns.
“In many moments you search and ask yourself, why do I do this?” Buso said via email. This was why: Buso, a self-taught astronomer, had just witnessed the surge of light at the birth of a supernova — something no other human, not even a professional scientist, had seen.
Alone on his rooftop, the star-strewn sky arced above him, the rest of the world sleeping below, Buso began to jump for joy.
His discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a landmark for astronomy. Buso’s images are the first to capture the brief “shock breakout” phase of a supernova, when a wave of energy rolls from a star’s core to its exterior just before the star explodes. Computer models had suggested the existence of this phase, but no one had witnessed it.
Great story, worth reading in full. And it serves as a reminder that science is not an occult occupation, only open to those who skilled in divine prognostications, but is a vocation open to all who study and work hard – and get a little bit lucky. Our protagonist here is not a scientist – he’s a locksmith who built himself an observatory! A devoted amateur, his name goes down in the history books.
