Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterM
Now at mag 11.5, an, as best as I can tell from going through the bright supernova pages, it would appear 2013aa is in fact the brightest supernova discovery in the 26 years since 1987A!
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Peter,
this might be a very luminous supernova, as the total B-band (blue) apparent magnitude of
the entire host galaxy is around 10.8 and the total V-band (visual) apparent magnitude of the entire galaxy is close to 10.0
(but I wouldn't bet that these magnitude figures are very accurate)
The HyperLeda Extragalactic Database gives a "guesstimate" (based only on the velocity distance of this galaxy and an estimate of the foreground extinction) of the luminosity of this galaxy as being Blue (B-band) absolute magnitude of -21.0
so maybe this supernova is notably luminous!!
What wavelength-band is the estimate of magnitude 11.5?
The all-important required "numbers" on extinction from foreground dust and the distance of this galaxy, are likely to be a bit "rubbery" at first, but perhaps we can come up with a reasonable estimate of the luminosity of this supernova
The galaxy itself is interesting, with some rather strong asymmetry. The arm structure and dust distribution on one side of this galaxy looks particularly unusual at shorter wavelengths, e.g. in this Carnegie Atlas image (blue)
The underlying fairly-strong bar structure is fairly well shown in this near-infrared (J+H+K) image from the 2MASS:
