Overview
- JWST imaging on September 1, 2025 and follow-up spectroscopy on October 8, 2025 by the VENUS team verified a hydrogen-rich Type IIP supernova near the end of its plateau phase.
- Lensing by the foreground cluster amplified the event by roughly 25–30 times and produced multiple images that enabled a firm identification.
- Spectral signatures indicate a very low-metallicity environment with less than about 10% of the Sun’s heavy-element abundance, pointing to early chemical conditions.
- The explosion occurred in an ultra-faint Lyman-alpha–emitting host galaxy that would likely have remained undetected without the supernova as a beacon.
- Archival Hubble data from March 2024 captured rest-frame far-ultraviolet emission days after the blast, consistent with shock breakout or circumstellar interaction, and the results were posted as an arXiv preprint on January 7, 2026.