Astronomers have discovered the most luminous supernova ever recorded. At its peak, the stellar explosion, which erupted in a galaxy 4.7 billion light-years from Earth, was 100 billion times as bright as the sun.
Robert Quimby was hunting for supernovas with a tiny telescope, the 18-inch ROTSE-IIIb at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas, when he spotted the explosion. Follow-up observations with the same observatory’s 10-meter Hobberly-Eberly Telescope hinted that light emitted by doubly ionized oxygen atoms in the supernova was shifted from its normal position in the spectrum to much longer, or redder, wavelengths.