Extraordinary Magnification of the Ordinary Type Ia Supernova PS1-10afx

Understand

Recently, Chornock and co-workers announced the Pan-STARRS discovery of a transient source reaching an apparent peak luminosity of ~4x10^44 erg s^-1.

• We show that the spectra of this transient source are well fit by normal Type Ia supernova (SNIa) templates.
• The multi-band colors and light-curve shapes are also consistent with normal SNeIa at the spectroscopically determined redshift of z=1.3883; however, the observed flux is a constant factor of ~30 times too bright in each band over time as compared to the templates.
• At minimum, this shows that the peak luminosities inferred from the light-curve widths of some SNeIa will deviate significantly from the established, empirical relation used by cosmologists.