5th June 2007: must have been a great night for tv...

The XMM-Newton satellite discovered the nova by accident. Built to observe x-rays in space - the satellite was turning from one target to another back in Oct of 2007 - an ordinary procedure. As it performed this manouever, it's field of view passed an extremely bright x-ray source that wasn't supposed to be there.

Soon, other astronomers confirmed that the star (boasting the glamorous name USNO-A2.0 0450-03360039) had brightened by more than 600 times. Further investigation of data archived by the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) robot telescope project revealed that the nova had taken place months earlier, on June 5th, 2007.

Despite that the location of the star was almost 10,000 light years away, if any of us were looking up - in roughly the right spot in the sky - we would have seen it visibly brighten.

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