An undated photo released Thursday by the University of Warwick of astronomer Dr. Andrew Levan who was one of the first members of the team to spot an exploding star. (AP) LONDON: A group of researchers claim they've found the most distant explosion ever detected, a pulse of high energy radiation sent by a disintegrating star near the very edge of the observable universe. The stellar blast was first spotted by a NASA satellite in April 2009, but researchers announced Wednesday that they have since gathered data placing it more than 13 billion light years away – meaning that the event took place when the universe was still in its infancy. Andrew Levan, one of the scientists behind the discovery, said this blast from the past blew open a window onto the universe's early years, showing that massive stars were already dying within the first few hundred million years of the birth of the universe. This particular explosion wasn't a supernova but a gamma ray burst, the name given to a short but powerful pulse of high energy radiation. Such bursts, thought to result from the collapse of massive stars into black holes, shoot jets of energy across the universe. Charles Meegan, a NASA researcher in gamma ray astronomy, said that a typical burst “puts out in a few seconds the same energy expended by the sun in its whole 10 billion year life span”. Not only are gamma ray bursts more powerful than supernovae, they're faster too – typically lasting only a few seconds or minutes. They work differently as well. Whereas a supernova spreads its radiation all around, gamma ray bursts shoot it out in narrow beams, like a laser, which can make them hard to detect. The University of Warwick's Levan said he was at an early morning meeting in Sweden on April 29, 2009, when his phone went off, alerting him to the explosion. Some of the world's most powerful telescopes were soon tasked with tracking the burst, but the view from Chile's La Silla Observatory was hampered by unfavorable atmospheric conditions, while two Hawaiian telescopes were buffeted by high winds. Chile's Very Large Telescope managed to train its eye on the sky for a while, but by then it was already getting light. Levan's paper, due to published soon in Astrophysical Journal, stated with 90 percent certainty that the gamma ray burst had been spotted between 13.11 billion and 13.16 billion light years away.
