SPACE - Shedding new light on star death: A new class of super-luminous supernovae

Astronomers at Queen's University Belfast have shed new light on the rarest and brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe. The research is published tomorrow in Nature. It proposes that the most luminous supernovae – exploding stars – are powered by small and incredibly dense neutron stars, with gigantic magnetic fields that spin hundreds of times a second ...

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-star-death-class-super-luminous-supernova