Super-bright supernova hints at dark lens

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A BIZARRELY bright supernova may really have been a normal stellar death – magnified by a “lens” of dark matter.

First seen in 2010, supernova PS1-10afx was 10 to 20 times brighter than otherwise similar star explosions. Its discoverers proposed that a galaxy cluster acted as a gravitational lens, warping space-time and, in effect, focusing the light towards Earth. But no cluster could be found.

Now Robert Quimby of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues suggest that a blob of invisible dark matter acted as the lens (arxiv.org/abs/1302.2785v1). If so, finding more oddly bright supernovae could help us gauge how much dark matter the universe holds.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Dark lens enhanced supernova’s spark”