Brightest Supernova Ever Seen
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Astronomers have detected the brightest stellar explosion/supernova (SN2006gy) ever recorded, a new breed of supernova that may also occur before long in our own galaxy—what one researcher said would be history’s most awesome star show, according to observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes.
“This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California, 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.”