It was nicknamed after the 1995 song "Champagne Supernova" by English rock band Oasis.

The primary mechanism invoked to explain how a white dwarf can exceed the Chandrasekhar mass is unusually rapid rotation; the added support effectively increases the critical mass.

One proposed explanation is that more of the total kinetic energy budget was expended climbing out of the deeper than usual potential well.

[4] This is important because the brightness of type Ia supernovae was thought to be essentially uniform, making them useful "standard candles" in measuring distances in the universe.

Such an aberrant type Ia supernova could throw distances and other scientific work into doubt; however, the light curve characteristics of SN 2003fg were such that it would never have been mistaken for an ordinary high-redshift Type Ia supernova.