• Scientists Discover Brightest Supernova Ever Seen (Harvard)

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have announced the discovery of the newest supernova to gain the title “Brightest Ever Known.” To be fair, as long as we keep building telescopes to peer at more and more distant corners of the universe, we are going to keep finding new things that are bigger, smaller, and otherwise more extreme than previously seen. 

This particular supernova, SN2016aps, was found using Pan-STARRS, and has been studied for 4 years using a mix of new images, and old data from prior to the supernova that allowed them to look for the earliest signs of the supernova going off. They found that SN2016aps was 500 times more luminous than a normal supernova. 

To create this massive supernova, the progenerator to SN2016aps had to be a massive, at least 100 times the mass of our Sun. This doesn’t mean the star had to start out that big, and in fact the team believes this object came from the merger of two stars that released a massive shell of gas and dust in the final years before their explosion. This created a system with a single star with an unusually high amount of hydrogen gas, and material to be slammed into. 

Early in our universe, star formation was much more common, and these kinds of mergers of massive stars into more massive stars may have also been more common. I look forward to seeing what exactly will be discovered when the Vera Rubin Observatory’s LSST comes online. Its massive mirror will survey the sky and help us maybe find a “brightest supernovae” that will hold its record for a long period of time.