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ASAS-SN-15lh facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

ASAS-SN-15lh is a super bright supernova that was first seen on June 14, 2015. It is the most powerful supernova ever found. When it was at its brightest, it shone 50 times brighter than our entire Milky Way galaxy!

This exploding star was first spotted in June 2015. It is still giving off huge amounts of energy. At its peak, this event was 200 times more powerful than a normal supernova. This made it shine with a brightness 570 billion times greater than our Sun. Scientists think this amazing explosion was made even stronger by a special object called a magnetar. This magnetar is a very dense object with a super strong magnetic field. It was created when the supernova first exploded. It's probably no bigger than a major city like London. It might also be spinning incredibly fast, perhaps a thousand times every second!

This supernova is very far away from Earth. It is about 3.8 billion light-years from us. To give you an idea, one light-year is how far light travels in one year. This means the light we see from ASAS-SN-15lh started its journey 3.8 billion years ago! The supernova was discovered by a project called the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). This project uses telescopes to scan the whole sky, looking for new supernovae.

Images for kids

  • ASASSN-15lhLightCurve

    This graph shows how bright ASASSN-15lh was over time. The purple line shows the brightness of the galaxy where the supernova happened.

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: ASASSN-15lh para niños

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