An artist’s impression of a gamma ray burst. Photo: CNRS Céline Lavalande
A monster star explosion, equal to a nuclear blast lasting seven hours, has been discovered by an international team including astronomers from Western Australia.
If the explosion happened near our galaxy and was pointed in the right direction, it would have destroyed everything, David Coward, an Associate Professor from the University of WA's School of Physics, said.
Lucky for Earth, the death of the massive star happened more than a billion years ago and is an extremely rare event.
The explosion occurred in a very distant galaxy 11 billion light years away, Mr Coward said.
"It's the first time we've seen this massive ultra-long gamma ray burst – hundreds of times bigger than the sun." he said.
The gamma ray burst is thousands of times more powerful than a supernova, such as the one captured by Western Australian scientists earlier this month.
NASA had kept the discovery under wraps for a year before it gave the nod to make it public, Mr Coward said.
"This discovery was very difficult to understand because it is really challenging our previous theory of how stars live and die," he said.
"The blasts emit surges of gamma rays – the most powerful form of light – as well as X-rays, and produce afterglows that can be observed at optical and radio energies."
It's the same type of radiation that comes from a nuclear explosion.
So called "gamma ray bursts" produce a flash of gamma rays as a star is collapsing in on itself.
"The end result is a black hole – the most exciting and amazing thing in the universe," Mr Coward said.
NASA's space telescopes and spacecraft detect an average of about one "gamma ray bursts" each day, however most last less than a minute.
Mr Coward said the first-of-its-kind discovery had exploded for an astonishing seven hours, by far the longest ever recorded.