The brightest flash of sunlight ever seen was captured by astronomers, and it came from an incident 2.4 billion light years away from Earth that was apparently set off by the formation of a black hole.
The gamma-ray burst, which is probably the most intense form of electromagnetic radiation, was initially noticed on October 9 by orbiting telescopes, and its afterglow is still being monitored by experts all around the world.
According to AFP, gamma-ray bursts that persist for hundreds of seconds, like the one that happened on Sunday, are thought to be created by huge stars that are dying and are more than 30 times bigger than our Sun.
The discovery of such bursts coming from outside the Milky Way in the 1960s by US satellites intended to check if the Soviet Union was launching bombs into space marked the beginning of gamma-ray studies.
