Weird star explosion is brightest supernova ever seen

A mammoth star explosion known as SN2016aps, which occurred in a galaxy about 3.6 billion light-years from Earth, is the brightest supernova ever seen, a new study reports.

"We can measure supernovae using two scales: the total energy of the explosion, and the amount of that energy that is emitted as observable light, or radiation," study lead author Matt Nicholl, a lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Birmingham in England, said in a statement.

"In a typical supernova, the radiation is less than 1% of the total energy," Nicholl added. "But in SN2016aps, we found the radiation was five times the explosion energy of a normal-sized supernova. This is the most light we have ever seen emitted by a supernova."

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(Image: Aaron Geller/Northwestern University)

An artist's illustration of a brilliant supernova, the explosive death of a star.

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SN2016aps can claim to be the brightest supernova ever observed, while it only looked like a faint 18th magnitude transient star from earth it was 3.5 billion light years away, and up close it outshone its parent galaxy by 200 times.

Most interestingly it's a candidate for a supernova mechanism that's different from other core collapse supernovae - the pulsed pair production instability where the star gets so hot it starts generating electron-positron pairs in the core, reducing the core's ability to resist gravity.