What was that?
More information about a mysterious, energetic burst, formally known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB), spotted in space 13 billion light-years away from Earth, has been unveiled.
The first sighting of this powerful GRB was in March 2025 by the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) satellite.
Rarely are these bursts spotted — and there are a few reasons why they’ve caused astronomers to scratch their heads in confusion.
For starters, gamma-ray bursts, powerful explosions described as fireworks in space, usually last only milliseconds to minutes and are caused by the collision of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, according to NASA.
Yet, this particular burst lasted a whopping 10 seconds and repeated three times over the course of 24 hours, most likely due to the explosive deaths of massive stars — an unusual thing to happen.
“This particular event is very rare and very exciting,” co-lead study author Andrew Levan, an astronomer at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in a statement from NASA.
Astronomers are determined to figure out more information on this 10-second burst. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Levan (Radboud). Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI).Astronomers believe the death of these stars occurred when the universe was only 730 million years old, as pointed out by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
To put that into perspective, the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.
But that’s about the extent of all they know, as of now.
The James Webb Space Telescope was able to help researchers determine A. Levan, A. Martin-Carrillo/ESORegardless, researchers seem to be excited about Webb’s findings.
“Only Webb could directly show that this light is from a supernova — a collapsing massive star. This observation also demonstrates that we can use Webb to find individual stars when the universe was only 5% of its current age.”
While researchers continue to hunt down more information on this rare burst, including how the stars exploded, these details allow them to remain hopeful.
“Knowing the distance will help us considerably understand the true nature of this source,” Antonio Martin-Carrillo, an assistant professor in astrophysics at the University College Dublin in Ireland, said in the statement.
“Webb provided the rapid and sensitive follow-up we needed,” Benjamin Schneider, a co-author and a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France, added.
While the mystery remains, it’s fair to say that this long-lasting burst is the earliest yet farthest supernova to be detected to date.
