At a distance of 10 billion light years, a supernova detected by the Dark Energy Survey team is one of the most distant ever discovered and confirmed
[img3="The yellow arrow marks the superluminous supernova DES15E2mlf in this false-color image of the surrounding field. This image was observed with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) gri-band filters mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope on December 28, 2015, around the time when the supernova reached its peak luminosity. (Observers: D. Gerdes and S. Jouvel)"]https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/07/images/supernova-400.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova that astronomers say is one of the most distant ever discovered. The brilliant explosion, more than three times as bright as the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy combined, occurred about 3.5 billion years after the big bang at a period known as "cosmic high noon," when the rate of star formation in the universe reached its peak.
Superluminous supernovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova resulting from the collapse of a massive star. But astronomers still don't know exactly what kinds of stars give rise to their extreme luminosity or what physical processes are involved.
The supernova known as DES15E2mlf is unusual even among the small number of superluminous supernovae astronomers have detected so far. It was initially detected in November 2015 by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration using the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Follow-up observations to measure the distance and obtain detailed spectra of the supernova were conducted with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope. ...
DES15E2mlf: A Spectroscopically Confirmed Superluminous Supernova That Exploded 3.5 Gyr After the Big Bang - Yen-Chen Pan et al
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The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova that astronomers say is one of the most distant ever discovered. The brilliant explosion, more than three times as brightas the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy combined, occurred about 3.5 billion years after the big bang at a period known as "cosmic high noon," when the rate of star formation in the universe reached its peak.
Okay... so... supernova DES15E2mlf was more than three times as bright as the 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy combined. Does that make it a bright superluminous supernova or a more modest superluminous supernova?
It was surprisingly hard to find the answer by googling. But I just may have a comparison for you (and for myself ):
Wikipedia wrote:
ASASSN-15lh (supernova designation SN 2015L) is a bright astronomical transient discovered by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). It was first detected on June 14th 2015, located within a faint galaxy in the southern constellation Indus.
The nature of is disputed. The most popular explanations are that it is the most luminous type I supernova ever observed, or a tidal disruption event around a supermassive black hole. Other theories include: gravitational lensing; a quark nova inside a Wolf-Rayet star; or a rapid magnetar spindown.
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At its brightest, it was approximately 50 times more luminousthan the whole Milky Way galaxy,[7] with an energy flux 570 billion times greater than the Sun.
So assuming that ASASSN-15lh really was a supernova, it was ~16 times brighter than DES15E2mlf.
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