A team of Israeli and Japanese astronomers have discovered the largest sample ever of supernovae, exploding stars using the Subaru Telescope located on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. On four separate occasions, Professor Dan Maoz and Or Graur of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Tel Aviv University and Associate Professor Tomonori Totani of Kyoto University pointed the telescope towards one single field called the Subaru Deep Field which spans an area of the sky, similar to that covered by the fool moon. Each observation caught approximately 40 supernovae in the act of exploding among 150,000 galaxies in the field. Altogether the team discovered 150 explosions, among them some considered the most distant and ancient ever seen.
