PARIS, France: An immensely powerful flash detected earlier this year was created by a massive star exploding when the universe was just five percent of its current age, astronomers said on Tuesday.
The flash was spotted on March 14 by a French-Chinese space telescope called SVOM, which launched last year on a mission to track gamma-ray bursts, the brightest and most powerful explosions in the cosmos.
When the young scientists working on the mission for France´s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) received a mobile phone alert that a major burst had arrived at Earth, they urged other telescopes to turn towards the source.
It came from a star around a hundred times bigger than our Sun that exploded 700 million years after the Big Bang, according to two studies published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.
“This is extremely rare -- it´s the fifth most distant gamma-ray burst ever detected,” said Bertrand Cordier, the CEA´s scientific lead for SVOM and a co-author of both studies. “The photons that reached our instruments travelled for 13 billion years” to reach Earth, he said.
