Researchers at the Kavli Institute in Beijing have reported potentially finding the brightest supernova ever seen. If correct this exploding star was about 600 billion times brighter than the sun; that's about 100 times brighter than your common to garden supernova and 2.5 to 5 times brighter than the previous brightest one depending upon who you ask. I have to caveat all this as it is not certain yet that it even was a supernova, it could also have been caused by the destruction of a star that passed a bit too close to a black hole; further observations over the coming months should help us find out. In any case, the explosion happened 2.8 billion years ago, about 700 million years before multi-cellular life evolved on earth.
Oh, and I calculated the brightness to be the equivalent of 2.3034e+36, or 2,303,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.3 undecillion 100 watt lightbulbs.
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| Image courtesy of ESO |
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