SN2016aps can claim to be the brightest supernova ever observed, while it only looked like a faint 18th magnitude transient star from earth it was 3.5 billion light years away, and up close it outshone its parent galaxy by 200 times. Most interestingly it's a candidate for a supernova mechanism that's different from other core collapse supernovae - the pulsed pair production instability where the star gets so hot it starts generating electron-positron pairs in the core, reducing the core's ability to resist gravity. The Paper that documented most of this work:
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