This illustration of superluminous supernova SN 1000+0216, the most distant supernova ever observed at a redshift of z=3.90, from when the Universe was just 1.6 billion years old, is the current record-holder for individual supernovae. (ADRIAN MALEC AND MARIE MARTIG (SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY))

The Brightest Supernovae Of All Have A Suspiciously Common Explanation

All supernovae are not created equal. After a 14 year investigation, the brightest ones have a surprising explanation.

Ethan Siegel
Starts With A Bang!
8 min readJan 31, 2020

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In 2006, astronomers witnessed a supernova that defied conventional explanation. Typically, supernovae arise either from the collapse of a massive star’s core (type II) or from a white dwarf that’s accumulated too much mass (type Ia), where in either case they can reach a peak brightness that’s some 10 billion times as luminous as our own Sun. But this one, known as SN 2006gy, was superluminous, radiating 100 times more energy than normal.

For more than a decade, the leading explanation was thought to be the pair-instability mechanism, where energies inside the star rise so high that matter-antimatter pairs are spontaneously produced. But a new detailed analysis, published in the January 24, 2020 issue of Science magazine, scientists reached a shocking conclusion: this was probably a fairly typical type Ia supernova simply occurring under odd conditions. Here’s how they got there.

Many strange transient events, such as AT2018cow, involve a combination of some type of supernova interacting with a spherical cloud of matter previously blown off by the star or otherwise existing in the surrounding material around a central explosion. (BILL SAXTON, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

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Ethan Siegel
Starts With A Bang!

The Universe is: Expanding, cooling, and dark. It starts with a bang! #Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist.