Terms I can understand.
So some massive collision of two stars happens and makes a big splosion detected by astronomers. I assume that they used a big calculator to work out that around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 J or 10 to the power of 33 Joules of energy was released. Of course the layman isn't really going to understand how much energy that really is so The Age did a unit conversion into layman's terms: "equivalent to the amount of energy that around 185.3 billion average Australian homes would use in a year." ... Yes now I understand, roughly the equivalent of two Toyota Landcruisers colliding.