NASAs Chandra X-ray spots brightest ever supernova explosion

NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded of a supernova.

Washington, May 8 : NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the brightest stellar explosion ever recorded of a supernova.

"This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova. 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," said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley.

Nathan and the team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin who made the observations are of the firm belief that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe and that a similar explosion might be ready to go off in our own galaxy.

The team believes many of the first generation of stars were this massive, and that this new supernova might provide a rare glimpse of how the first stars died.

"It is unprecedented, however, to find such a massive star and witness its death. The discovery of the supernova, known as SN 2006gy will provide evidence that the death of such massive stars is fundamentally different from theoretical predictions." said Alex Filippenko, leader of the ground-based observations at the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, Calif., and the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king. We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted," he said.

According to Filippenko, the Chandra observation allowed the team to rule out the most likely alternative explanation for the supernova: that a white dwarf star with a mass only slightly higher than the Sun exploded into a dense, hydrogen-rich environment. In that event, SN 2006gy should have been 1,000 times brighter in X-rays than what Chandra detected.

"This provides strong evidence that SN 2006gy was, in fact, the death of an extremely massive star," said Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley, who led the Chandra observations.

According to the researchers, the star that produced SN 2006gy apparently expelled a large amount of mass prior to exploding.

Researchers said this large mass loss is similar to that seen from Eta Carinae, a massive star in our galaxy, and has raised suspicion that Eta Carinae might be poised to explode as a supernova.

"Although SN 2006gy is intrinsically the brightest supernova ever, it is in the galaxy NGC 1260, some 240 million light years away. However, Eta Carinae is only about 7,500 light years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. Though we don't know for sure if Eta Carinae will explode soon, but we had better keep a close eye on it just in case. Eta Carinae's explosion could be the best star-show in the history of modern civilization, " said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who was not involved in the research.

ANI