A international research team, lead by Finnish Seppo Mattila of Tuorla Observatory, has found a brand new supernova. This is the very first supernova found using adaptive optics techniques. The new supernova is now called SN 2005ip. The team used the Naos Conica Adaptive Optics instument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to find the supernova. What makes this interesting is that the supernova was found at infrared wavelength. In fact, before SN 2004ip only half a dozen of the many thousands of known supernovae had been found in the infrared.

Read more from the official press release of Tuorla Observatory.