Hubble snaps hyper-bright Supernova in nearby Galaxy NGC 2403

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The explosion of a massive star blazes with the light of 200 million Suns in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The stellar blast, near the top right corner in the picture, is called a supernova. The supernova is so bright in this image that it easily could be mistaken for a foreground star in our Milky Way Galaxy. And yet, this supernova, called SN 2004dj, resides far beyond our galaxy.

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Its home is in the outskirts of NGC 2403, a galaxy located 11 million light-years from Earth. Although the supernova is far from Earth, it is the closest stellar explosion discovered in more than a decade.
This Type II-P supernova was discovered by Koichi Itagaki, a Japanese astronomer on July 31, 2004. At the time of its discovery, its apparent brightness was 11.2 visual magnitude; the discovery occurred after the supernova had reached its peak magnitude. The supernova's progenitor is a star in a young, compact star cluster in the galaxy NGC 2403, in Camelopardalis. The cluster had been cataloged as the 96th object in a list of luminous stars and clusters by Allan Sandage in 1984; the progenitor is therefore commonly referred to as Sandage 96.
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Credit: NASA, ESA, A.V. Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley), P. Challis (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), et al.