About a billion light-years away, an extraordinary stellar explosion lit up in the night sky. The blast, detected December 12, 2024, was some 30 times the brightness of a typical supernova, putting it in a rare group of superluminous supernovas. Now, astronomers believe they know what made the explosion so bright — an extreme type of star called a magnetar, the team reports March 11 in Nature.
“Superluminous supernovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than regular supernovae,” says astrophysicist Joseph Farah of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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