Brightest supernova ever seen shines twice as bright as any other

Many stars end their lives in one last supernova glow of gloryBut until now we didn’t know how bright and powerful cosmic death spasms can be. Scientists have seen a supernova more than twice as bright as any other stellar explosion.

A team from Harvard University, Northwestern University, Ohio University and Birmingham University in the UK believe that the supernova labeled SN2016aps could be two massive stars that merged before exploding.

“In a typical supernova, radiation (or observable light) is less than one percent of total energy. But in SN2016aps, we found that radiation was five times the burst energy of a normal-size supernova,” said the astronomer. Matt from the University of Birmingham. Nicholl said in a statement. “This is the largest amount of light we’ve ever seen emitted by a supernova.”

Nicholl is the lead author of an article on the finding published Monday in Nature Astronomy.

Scientists observed the explosion for two years and were able to determine that its mass was as much as 100 times greater than the mass of our sun, and five to 10 times more massive than a typical supernova.

Prior to this discovery, the notion that two stars could merge and fuel a supernova supernova, what astronomers call “pulsation pair instability,” was theoretical.

Harvard professor Edo Berger, co-author of the article, said the discovery comes at a great time, as next-generation telescopes could be used to target similar events and create a kind of time machine in the process.

“Now that we know that such energetic explosions occur in nature, NASA’s New James Webb Space Telescope we will be able to see similar events so far that we will be able to look back in time to the death of the first stars in the universe, “said Berger.