means A supernova is the catastrophic explosion of a dying star, briefly outshining an entire galaxy as it blasts its forged elements into space.

from From Latin: super, "above" or "beyond," stitched onto nova, "new" — itself short for stella nova, "new star," the name early astronomers gave to points of light that flared up where none had been seen before. The irony is built in: a nova looked new but was really something old and unstable erupting. "Supernova" was coined in the 1930s by astronomers Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky to mark a class of these blazes far more violent than ordinary novae — the truly cataclysmic ones, beyond new.