Our sun is not a small star, but there are plenty of stars that are bigger than it. However, stars do have an upper limit to the size they can grow. Stars with more than 20 solar masses are very uncommon, but Wolf-Rayet stars are very rare, even in this very small subset of stars. A Wolf-Rayet star is a massive star that is unusually hot, which causes intense solar winds. This cause the star to eject material at an extremely high rate, losing the mass of the Earth to space every year, a billion times higher than what the sun does. There are only a few hundred known Wolf-Rayet stars, and we were unsure of how they died. It would make sense that they went supernova, like all the other stars that are a bit more massive than the sun, but because we know of so few and the unique way they die, we've never actually witnessed a Wolf-Rayet star go supernova. Until now.Astronomers were able to focus on supernova SN 2013cu mere hours after it was discovered, and this allowed the observation of ionized particles around the exploding star, a phenomenon that only lasts about a day. This is important because it allowed astronomers to accurately identify what the material surrounding the star actually was, and in this case, this material almost certainly came from a Wolf-Rayet star. This means that scientists can now say that Wolf-Rayet stars do go supernova like other stars of comparable size. This seems like a no-brainer, but we weren't entirely sure. Confirmation is important in science.
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