WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) – A supernova – the explosion marking the end of a massive star’s life – is one of the brightest cosmic events, usually about a billion times more luminous than the sun. But some – a small fraction – are even brighter than that, 10 to 100 times more luminous. These are called superluminous supernovas.Why these are so bright has been a mystery in astrophysics. But one such superluminous supernova involving a huge star in a galaxy about a billion light-years from Earth is now helping scientists solve the mystery. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).This supernova, first spotted in December 2024, was studied using the Las Cumbres Observatory, headquartered in California, and the Chile-based ATLAS survey telescope.AdvertisementAdvertisementResearchers determined that it became ultra-bright because the explosion left behind a magnetar, an extremely compact and rapidly spinning stellar remnant with an immensely powerful magnetic field. The magnetar amped up the luminosity by sweeping up charged particles while it was spinning hundreds of times per second and flinging them into the expanding cloud of gas and dust from the star that was blasted outward into space.A magnetar is a type of neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star after its death.”When a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it can no longer resist the crushing force of gravity,” said Joseph Farah, a doctoral student in astrophysics at the Las Cumbres Observatory and the University of California, Santa Barbara, lead author of the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.”The core of the star is squeezed under the weight of the …
