superluminous supernovae tagged posts

1. Astrophysicist Ken Chen ran 2D simulations with Berkeley Lab’s CASTRO code on NERSC’s Edison supercomputer to better understand the physical conditions that create superluminious supernova.
Credit: Ken Chen, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan 2. Superluminous Supernova simulation in 2D generated with Berkeley Lab developed CASTRO code. (Credit: Ken Chen, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

Sightings of a rare breed of superluminous supernovae – stellar explosions that shine 10 to 100 times brighter than normal – are perplexing astronomers. First spotted only in last decade, scientists are confounded by the extraordinary brightness of these events and their explosion mechanisms...

NASA’s artist impression of SN 2006gy, one of the most luminous hypernovae seen. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

An international team has spotted a surprising UV rebrightening in a distant superluminous supernova, ASASSN-15lh. The event has baffled the scientists as has no hydrogen emission characteristic of superluminous supernovae and tidal disruption events. Also called hypernovae, these are dozens of times more luminous than normal supernovae. ASASSN-15lh, detected by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) in 2015, is a real ‘assassin’ among these explosion events. It is about 200X more powerful than the average supernova and approximately 570 billion times brighter than our sun. It is so far the most luminous supernova ever detected.

Now, Brown et al have used data from NASA’...