Supernova 'Mingus' could shed light on dark energy

Astronomers have spotted the most distant supernova ever seen.

Nicknamed "Mingus", it was described at the 221st American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.

These lightshows of dying stars have been seen since ancient times, but modern astronomers use details of their light to probe the Universe's secrets.

Ten billion light-years distant, Mingus will help shed light on so-called dark energy, the force that appears to be speeding up cosmic expansion.

But the data were simply not good enough to pin down what was seen. As David Rubin of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author on the study, told the AAS meeting, "for a sense of brightness, this supernova is about as bright as a firefly viewed from 3,000 miles away".

Prof Frieman told BBC News that the distant supernova result fits neatly into a story that he hoped the Dark Energy Survey would explore in great detail.

"What they're doing is using the Hubble telescope to go really deep - we're going to use the Dark Energy Survey to go very broad," he explained to BBC News.

"They're finding tens of supernovae at these high, and we're going to find thousands of supernovae not quite as deep. You really need both of those together to really make progress in trying to figure out why the Universe is speeding up."