The photo above shows an artist's rendering of the recently discovered and extremely powerful super supernova ASASSN-15lh.

(Beijing Planetarium/Jin Ma)

Astronomers have bore witness to what is said to be the brightest star explosion ever, shining even brighter than the entire Milky Way.

Thursday an international team revealed ASASSN-15lh, "," reports the Associated Press. The "super supernova" is considered to be especially rare and is more than twice as luminous as any supernova to date.

The supernova was , with two 14-centimeter diameter lense telescopes that form the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae, according to a release from Peking Univerity'sKavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. The telescopes specialize in finding objects that appear suddenly and are very bright, but too far away for the naked eye to notice.

"ASASSN-15lh is the most powerful supernova discovered in human history," said study lead author and astronomerSubo Dong. "The explosion's mechanism and power source remain shrouded in mystery because all known theories meet serious challenges in explaining the immense amount of energy ASASSN-15lh has radiated."

(PHOTOS: )

The photo above shows pseudo-color images of the host galaxy before ASASSN-15lh's explosion as taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) (left), and the resulting supernova as taken by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT) 1-meter telescope network (right).

(The Dark Energy Survey, B. Shappee and the ASAS-SN team)

Located in a galaxy estimated to be about 3.8 billion light years away, its peak intensity is said to be 20 times brighter than the Milky Way - some even estimate it to be 50 times brighter - and 570 billion times brighter than the sun, AP reports.

When Dong learned the immensity of the discovery, he was “too excited to sleep the rest of the night,” AP also reports. His fellow researcher Benjamin Shappee said the results initially seemed “surreal.”

“Discoveries like this are the reason I am an astronomer,” Shappee told AP. “Nature is extremely clever and it is often more imaginative than we can be.”

Now that this explosive discovery has been made, scientists are directing their efforts towards finding out what makes the supernova so powerful.

"The explosion's mechanism and power source remain shrouded in mystery because all known theories meet serious challenges in explaining the immense amount of energy ASASSN-15lh has radiated," said Dong.

According to him, ASASSN-15lh's discovery "may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of super luminous supernova."

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