The Brightest Supernova Ever

Posted by jns on 10 May 2007

Here’s the lead from the NASA release about an observation with the Chandra X-Ray [orbiting] Observatory of “the brightest supernova ever“:

May 7, 2007: The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own galaxy.

“This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. “That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We’ve never seen that before.”

Astronomers think many of the first stars in the Universe were this massive, and this new supernova may thus provide a rare glimpse of how those first generation stars died. It is unprecedented, however, to find such a massive star and witness its death. The discovery of the supernova, known as SN 2006gy, provides evidence that the death of such massive stars is fundamentally different from theoretical predictions.

The photographs accompanying the release are extraordinary, showing that the supernova was as bright as the core of its galaxy — that’s bright! It seems this one was bright enough that some light even reached the mainstream press, as in this story from the L.A. Times.

As additional background, may I point out my own posting called “A Star Explodes in Slow Motion“, which feature an informative excerpt from Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, by Peter Atkins.