Lambda L2

 

  Researchers recently  found a transient that outshines all others like it —a supernova known as AT2020mrf. They described their discovery in a paper posted on the preprint server arXiv.org last December and submitted to the  Astrophysical Journal.   They also presented it at a virtual press conference at the  2022 American Astronomical Society meeting  in January. This supernova was one of the brightest and most energetic stellar deaths ever seen, and it might provide a rare glimpse into how massive stars give birth to some of the universe’s strangest objects: black holes and neutron stars.