The Greatest Show in Space | TIME: "Remember the supernova, that great burst of sky violence that was supposed to be the finest pyrotechnics show the heavens could offer? Forget it. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and several ground-based optical telescopes have just witnessed a cosmic blast that makes the supernova look like a popgun.
The explosion, the subject of a paper that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, took place 240 million light-years away and was, in the words of astronomer Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, a leader of the observing team, 'truly monstrous.' About 100 times as powerful as an ordinary supernova, it resulted from the death of a star that was probably 150 times as massive as our sun, or 'as massive as a star can get,' says Smith. What's more, a similarly huge and unstable star is rumbling a lot closer to Earth than we might like."
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