The BIGGEST bang

I love the way the NYT reports this:

Kaboom indeed.

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported yesterday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.

No, I didn't see it. I don't think I have ever seen a galaxy more than 100 million light years away. The galaxy where this star exploded is about 240 million light years away. If I were to look at such a beast in my largest scope it would be the ultimate in faint fuzzies. The article also speculates about the possibility of Eta Carinae, a star in our galaxy, epxloding in a similar way. If it does, we won;t see it from here - that's a southern hemisphere star. But it's nice to know someone was looking when this distant star exploded and the possibilites here are extraordinary as the article explains.

The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion. Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.

“It is quite possibly the most massive star that has ever been seen to explode,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, who estimated it as “freakishly massive,” about 150 times the mass of the Sun.

Dr. Smith led a team of astronomers from Berkeley and the University of Texas who have submitted a paper about the supernova to The Astrophysical Journal and discussed the results yesterday at a news conference from NASA headquarters in Washington. “We’re really excited about this,” he said. “If it really is what we think it is, it forces us to rethink how massive stars die.”

Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The discovery was made by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas.

The complete article can be found here.

The NASA news release is here.