Nasa sees brightest supernova

The brightest supernova ever seen has been observed by Nasa's orbiting Chandra x-ray telescope.

The huge stellar explosion released around 100 times more energy than a typical supernova and was 100,000 million times brighter than the sun at its peak.

It is very unusual to observe the death of a super-massive star, so scientists will be keen to use the data from the orbiting telescope and others on the ground to piece together what happened.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,2074918,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Here's the scoop from NASA


http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photos07-052.html



According to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes, the supernova SN 2006gy is the brightest and most energetic stellar explosion ever recorded and may be a long-sought new type of explosion. The top panel of this graphic is an artist's illustration that shows what SN 2006gy may have looked like if viewed at a close distance. The bottom left panel is an infrared image, using adaptive optics at the Lick Observatory, of NGC 1260, the galaxy containing SN 2006gy. The panel to the right shows Chandra's X-ray image of the same field of view, again showing the nucleus of NGC 1260 and SN 2006gy.

The Chandra observation allowed astronomers to determine that SN 2006gy was indeed caused by the collapse of an extremely massive star, and not the most likely alternative explanation for the explosion, the destruction of a low-mass star.

Image credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UC Berkeley/N.Smith et al.; IR: Lick/UC Berkeley/J.Bloom & C.Hansen

...apparently, there was no gravitational collapse resulting in a black hole or even a neutron star. Not even a white dwarf. This star basically gave itself a Viking funeral.

SN 2006gy - the James Dean of supergiants. Woo-hoo!