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.
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.
