Scientists discover most powerful supernova ever
April 13, 2020
An international team of scientists have identified an "extremely energetic supernova from a very massive star" and said it was the biggest explosion ever recorded, according to a study published on Monday.
The astronomers believe that the supernova was originally formed from the merging of two massive stars because of the unusually high amount of hydrogen contained in the explosive cloud.
Such a phenomenon so far only exists in theory and has never been confirmed through astronomical observations, according to the scientists.
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'The most massive'
The team of astronomers, led by the University of Birmingham in the UK and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, observed the explosion for two years and recorded their findings in the peer reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.
Dubbed SN2016aps, the experts said the phenomenon is an example of an "extremely rare pulsational pair-instability" supernova.
"Stars with extremely large mass undergo violent pulsations before they die, shaking off a giant gas shell. This can be powered by a process called the pair instability, which has been a topic of speculation for physicists for the last 50 years," said Matt Nicholl from the School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute of Gravitational Wave Astronomy in Birmingham.
"If the supernova gets the timing right, it can catch up to this shell and release a huge amount of energy in the collision. We think this is one of the most compelling candidates for this process yet observed, and probably the most massive," he explained.
10 times more powerful
According to the study, the supernova is 10 times stronger than a normal supernova and about 500 times as bright. In addition to its impressive size and brightness, it was "spectacular" in other properties as well, the scientists said.
"In a typical supernova, the radiation is less than 1 per cent of the total energy. 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," said Nicholl.
Usually supernovas only emit 1% of their energy in visible light, but the SN2016aps emits a far greater proportion.
SN2016aps is estimated to contain the energy equivalent to a record 200 trillion trillion gigatons of TNT. TNT is a convention for expressing energy including the energy released during an explosion.
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A new key to unlock secrets of the universe
Scientists hope that the discovery of SN2016aps will lead to the detection of other similar supernovas and help look back to conditions in the early days of the universe.
"Finding this extraordinary supernova couldn't have come at a better time," said Edo Berger, one of the co-authors from Harvard University.
"Now that we know such energetic explosions occur in nature, NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope will be able to see similar events so far away that we can look back in time to the deaths of the very first stars in the Universe."