“Astronomers reported that they had seen the most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded… [They’ve] have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light years away in the constellation Perseus by ROBERT QUIMBY, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas. The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — might be an example of a completely new type of explosion, astronomers said. Such a blast — proposed but never seen — would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.” -NYTimes, 5/8/07
This is what they think this might have looked like:
