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The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest-ever gamma-ray burst.
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope was developed by NASA in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and partners including academic institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.
A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.
The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away. Taking into account the huge distance from earth of the burst, scientists worked out that the blast was stronger than 9,000 supernovae -- powerful explosions that occur at the end of a star's lifetime -- and that the gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe gamma-ray bursts occur when stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse. They shine hundreds of times brighter than a typical supernova and about a million-trillion times as bright as earth's sun, NASA says on its website.
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