WARWICK, England, May 25 (UPI) -- U.K. and U.S. astronomers say they have spotted the most distant explosion -- and possibly the most distant object -- ever seen in the universe.
University of Warwick astronomer Dr. Andrew Levan was one of the first to spot the exploding star, known as a Gamma-ray Burst, detected at an extreme estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, putting it 96 percent of the way to the edge of the universe and making it the most distant object ever seen.
The research team spent two years carrying out a careful examination of their data to see if the burst, first detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009, really was a record-breaker, a University of Warwick release said Wednesday.
"The more we examined this burst, the better it looked," Levan said.
Satellite observatories can detect the extreme brightness of Gamma-ray bursts even when they occur at distances of billions of light years.
"The race to find distant objects stems from the desire to find and study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang," Levan said.
The researchers analyzed data from the Swift satellite, the Gemini North Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
"This GRB shows us that there is a lot of action going on in the universe which we can't currently see," said Professor Nial Tanvir from the University of Leicester and the leader of the Hubble part the research.
"Our observations show us that even the Hubble Space Telescope is only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the distant universe."
