The brightest supernova ever observed is so blinding, it outshines the galaxy in which it’s found.
On February 22, 2016, astronomers using Hawaii’s Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System observatory spotted the supernova, which they dubbed SN2016aps. They’ve been studying it ever since.
The astronomers say SN2016aps is so bright that for the past four billion years, it has blotted out the light of its surrounding galaxy, an unnamed cluster of stars about 4 million light-years away. For over 1,000 days, SN2016aps emitted a record-breaking amount of radiation into space.
But SN2016aps wasn’t just the brightest supernova ever seen. Gizmodo reports it was also the most massive supernova ever observed—between five to 10 times more massive than your run-of-the-mill supernova, and 50 to 100 times more massive than the sun.
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“A very massive star like this might be more common in the very early universe,” astronomer Matt Nicholl, of the University of Birmingham in the U.K., told Gizmodo. “We might be able to use this data to peer back in time to see the explosions of some of the very first stars.”
Read more: yahoo
