They call it the superstar of supernovas

Los Angeles Times:


Hey......this is BIG!

Shining like a hay fire across a wide prairie, the brightest supernova ever recorded has been found in a galaxy 240 million light-years from Earth.Astronomers said Monday that the supernova might represent a new way for giant stars to die."Of all the exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."Six months after it was spotted by University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby, it is still as bright as an average supernova, NASA astrophysicist Alan Smale said at a news conference in Washington.Astronomers identified the star as SN 2006gy. They estimated its size at more than 100 solar masses, which makes it one of the largest stars ever observed. The Milky Way, with a population of 400 billion stars, has only a few known to be as big.The supernova's power is so immense that it outshines its galaxy, NGC 1260, home to some of the oldest known stars in the cosmos, scientists said. It was observed by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in space, as well as by telescopes on Earth.Stars 10 times the size of Earth's sun and larger had been thought to end their lives by burning off the heavier elements until the fusion process that powers the stars stopped.At that point, the heat produced in the core of the star can no longer support itself and the star starts to collapse.The outer shell is blown off in a typical supernova, of which hundreds are seen every year across the cosmos, while the inner layers go on crunching until the star becomes a highly compact neutron star or a black hole.