A star exploded 168,000 years ago, and we caught its ghost particles arriving in real time

When a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud went supernova, detectors buried deep underground on Earth caught a burst of neutrinos arriving hours before the light did — the first time neutrinos from a supernova outside our solar system had ever been observed. It confirmed core-collapse supernova theory and effectively launched neutrino astronomy as a field.

— Kamiokande-II Collaboration (K. Hirata et al.), Observation of a Neutrino Burst in Coincidence with Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud — Physical Review Letters, 1987