That's the only comparison that I could come up with that ties in at all with human imagination. This was the brightest documented explosion in history. The explosion might have been even more violent than that. In supernovas, only 1 percent of the energy is released as light. Theorists are now puzzling over how the universe can generate the energy of the Dec. 14 burst.
Some theories involve the collisions of spinning black holes.
Other suggest they're the death throes of ultra-massive stars. Shrinivas Kulkarni, the other principal investigator of the Caltech team, says all the bursts have been located in dusty regions where stars form, suggesting the massive explosions may play a role in the birth of new stars. Woosley and others speculate that such explosions occur when a black hole swallows a neutron star. A black hole is a collapsed object so dense that its gravity permits not even light to escape, and a neutron star is a massive collapsed star. Woosley acknowledges the explanation is only speculation.