Question: How did you discover the dying star tearing itself apart?

Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:

I work in a group of astronomers who are surveying a large area of the sky for things like this. We use a telescope in the Canary Islands called the Isaac Newton Telescope and we’ve been taking lots of images of large areas of the sky to search for things like this. Then we spend time looking at these images, and when we find something interesting like this star we start to investigate it in more detail!