Oct. 16, 2007 Astronomer Robert Quimby has done it again. Found
the most luminous supernova ever, that is. Quimby discovered the
current record holder, supernova 2006gy, last year as part of
his Texas Supernova Search project. Now he announces that a
supernova he discovered earlier in the project is actually twice
as luminous. Using follow-up studies to pinpoint its distance,
supernova 2005ap peaked at more than 100 billion times the
brightness of the Sun. This supernova is a Type II, Quimby said,
because it contains hydrogen. Most Type II supernovae are
thought to result when the cores of massive stars, those seven
to eight times or more heavy than the Sun, collapse under their
own weight and trigger an explosion. This particular Type II is
300 times brighter than average, Quimby said, and lies in a
dwarf galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, well behind
the famous Coma cluster of galaxies. “It’s clearly not the same
as 2006gy,” Quimby’s colleague and supernova expert J. Craig
Wheeler of The University