Last fall University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby was reimaging the same large galaxy clusters night after night with a modest 46-cm robotic telescope at the McDonald Observatory in west Texas. He had organized this project to find interesting, relatively nearby supernovae soon after onset so that other, larger instruments could follow them in detail as they waxed and waned. On 18 September he discovered a new light in a minor galaxy of the Perseus cluster, 200 million light-years away, that would soon prove to be the most luminous supernova ever recorded.
When SN 2006gy, as it was labeled, finally peaked 40 days later (an estimated 70 days after onset), it was 10 times brighter than the peak luminosity of a type Ia, the brightest of the ordinary supernovae (see figure 1). And five months after peaking, when a type Ia would long since have faded, SN 2006gy...
