A Humongous Star Explosion

The "SN 2006gy" explosion took place in the galaxy called NGC 1260, 240 million light-years away. It was 100 times more powerful than most typical supernovas, the brightest and most energetic ever recorded. It was first detected in September 2006, using ground-based telescopes and NASA's Chandra X-ray space observatory. It picked up brightness in 70 days, and reached 50 billion times the light of the Sun at its peak, 10 times brighter than its own galaxy.

The importance of this discovery is that it leads to a hypothesis that massive star explosions, like this one, were very common in the early universe. It is believed that many of the first stars in our universe were very big, and this explosion indicates what happened when one of them exploded. The star that produced this supernova had expelled a lot of mass prior to the explosion. This is very similar to what we can see at Eta Carinae, a massive star in our own galaxy, suggesting that this star is about to explode as well in a similar fashion. This star is only 7,500 light years away, and astronomers are expecting a spectacular show if it does explode.

This type of supernova is different from others, where they run out of fuel and collapse under their own gravity. This explosion may have been triggered under some conditions, where the core of a massive star produces a lot of gamma ray radiation. The energy from this radiation gets converted into particle and anti-particle pairs. The drop in energy causes the star to collapse under its own huge gravity. Afterwards, the thermonuclear reactions continue, and the star explodes. This explosion is suggesting that the first stars of the universe ended up with this fate, rather than completely collapsing to a black hole as previously theorized. This hypothesis is important because it leads to a different outcome. Instead of a black hole sucking and locking away matter forever, a supernova took place, spreading newly formed matter into space.

For more information, visit:

• NASA
• SPACE.com
• Wikipedia(Supernova, Star, Particle physics in cosmology)