The largest survey to date of distant exploding stars is giving astronomers new clues to what’s behind the Type Ia supernovae they use to measure distances across the cosmos.

In the past decade, robotic telescopes have turned astronomers' attention to scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may or may not point to new and unusual physics.

The Hubble Space Telescope will devote an unprecedented amount of time over the next few years to documenting galaxy evolution in the early universe and to studying whether distant supernovae can be extremely reliable measures of distance across vast regions of the cosmos.

An extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first populated the Universe.

There is no age restriction on the chance to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe. Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old from Warwick, N.Y., has made such a mark on astronomy with the discovery of Supernova 2008ha.