It wasn't a Toronto Film Festival hit, but it did receive rave reviews in scientific circles. The film in question was Norbert Bartel's mini-movie showing the death of a star as it explodes (a supernova) at a recent conference of the American Astronomical Society.

    The movie comes in two lengths: five or ten seconds.

    An international team led by the York astronomer and an American colleague were principal investigators in a three-year-project illustrating the evolution of a supernova. Their work will shed more light on the effects of a star's explosion, and help in determining the cosmological distances and the age of the universe.

    It's the first time that high quality supernova images have been made and assembled into a movie. The film shows the supernova changing its structure and reveals images of the star's expanding debris. "So much material spills out from the explosion at such high speeds it sweeps away everything in its path," says Bartel. "In fact, it probably evaporates any planetary system that may have existed around the original star."

    The images for the movie were taken between May 1993 and December 1995 and show the various phases of the supernova's life. Team members "filled in the gaps" through computer enhancement to provide a smooth, complete picture of the evolution.

    The movie's starring star, SN1993J, is located in galaxy M81 about 12 million light years away from Earth.

    Eighteen radio telescopes around the globe were used to simultaneously record data on SN1993J, giving a detailed, magnified picture that would otherwise require a telescope the size of the Earth.