The King of all Supernovae

The big news out of NASA today is that the Chandra Observatory recorded the brightest supernova seen so far.
AstroProf has a really good post about it here. He points out out that by bright, we don’t mean the brightest in the sky (those are usually within our own galaxy), rather we mean that this supernova was among the most energetic, it gave off the most radiation (light) we’ve ever seen.

From this NASA press release:

“This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. “That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We’ve never seen that before.”

This supernova was originally recorded in X-rays on November 14, 2006 by the Chandra X-ray observatory in an eight hour exposure. The supernova is about 238,000,000 light years away in the galaxy NGC 1260, a galaxy dominated by older stars (I kept wanting to type NCC 1260, old habits, I know it’s not a ship from Star Trek).

I know I don’t usually report much in the way of news, but I’m starting to get lots of requests from my readers who would like to hear this kind of thing from me because they don’t want to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and try to keep up to date. I’m more than happy to help, I’ve listed most of the better posts and the news releases in this post.

Details of this observation is being published in this paper in the latest Astrophysical Journal. The preceding link is to the abstract. Sadly, you need a subscription to download the entire article, or you can go to a library to see the full thing in printed form.

Here’s another decent article on Space.com about it.

Technorati Tags: NGC 1260, SN 2006gy, supernova