Brightest Explosion In the Universe Ever

Seen Defies Astronomy Theories

by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer | November 22, 2013 09:53am ET

An unusually bright gamma-ray burst produced a jet that emerged at nearly

the speed of light.

A mysterious blast of light spotted earlier this year near the constellation Leo was actually the
brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, and was triggered by an extremely powerful stellar
explosion, new research reports.

On April 27, several satellites including NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope observed an unusually bright burst of gamma radiation. The explosion unleashed
an energetic jet of particles that traveled at nearly the speed of light, researchers said.

"We suddenly saw a gamma-ray burst that was extremely bright a monster gamma-ray
burst," study co-author Daniele Malesani, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at the
University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in a statement. "This [was] one of the most
powerful gamma-ray bursts we have ever observed with the Swift satellite."