I'm in serious awe of this. It's already difficult to grasp something as cataclysmic as a "regular" supernova, but this one is off the charts.
That's what I had learned, too - that stars beyond a certain mass would always implode into black holes rather than going supernova. But now scientists will have to adopt a new explosion mechanism to explain this mother of supernovas. Wow....the supernova was 100 times more energetic than usual. Such a phenomenon would require the violent destruction of a star 150 times more massive than our sun — which is near the theoretical limit for a single star's size.
Theorists had thought that stars that big were more likely to collapse completely into black holes, sucking all their mass into gravitational sinkholes.
That seems uncomfortably close...But the findings also raise the possibility that Eta Carinae, the most massive and energetic star observed in our own galaxy, could blow up in the same way.
It's only 7,500 light-years from Earth, or about 45 quadrillion miles away — which may sound like a long way in earthly terms, but isn't all that distant for a cosmic supernova.
