Some of the greatest astronomers of the 1600s, including Hevelius - the father of lunar cartography - and Cassini, carefully documented the appearance of a new star in the skies in 1670. Astronomers know it today by the name Nova Vul 1670. Now, new discoveries made by a team from the Max Planck Institut fur Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany, reveal that this "new" star that astronomers saw in the sky in 1670 was not a nova, but rather a much rarer stellar collision. Using modern sub-millimeter telescopes, the team was able to finally unravel the mystery more than 340 years later by analyzing a fascinating variety of molecules in the stellar emissions that provided the required tell-tale evidence.