Astronomers detect cosmic flash from early universe star blast

TDT | Manama

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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 yesterday.

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 told AFP.

The detection of the burst, which lasted tens of seconds, is also “the most precise in terms of the light we collected and the measurements we made,” he added.