clipped from: space.newscientist.com The brightest supernova ever recorded may have been triggered by an exotic process involving antimatter in an extremely massive star, a new study says. The explosion may offer a rare glimpse of how the universe's first generation of stars died.
The explosion was first spotted on 18 September 2006 and named SN 2006gy. It quickly became apparent that it was something out of the ordinary.
To begin with, it broke the record for the intrinsically brightest supernova ever recorded. Other events, like SN 1987A, have appeared brighter to us, but only because they took place much closer to Earth.
But new evidence suggests it was something even more exotic. It now appears to have been an extremely massive star meeting its end in a highly unusual way that involves the production of antimatter, according to a team of astronomers led by Nathan Smith of the University of California in Berkeley, US.