Rare Hypernova burst detected along the Milky Way for the first time.

Scientists have found evidence of a rare gargantuan stellar explosion from the early days of the universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

Known as a "magneto-rotational Hypernova," this ancient explosion would have been roughly 10 times brighter and more energetic than a typical supernova (the violent death that awaits most stars in the universe, including Earth's sun), leaving behind a strange stew of elements that helped fuel the next generation of stars.

Stars that go boom like this must be massive (dozens of times the size of the sun), spin rapidly, and contain a powerful magnetic field, according to a study published July 7 in the journal Nature. When a honking' star like this dish, it goes out with an enormous powerful bang — collapsing into a dense, energetic husk that fuses the progenitor star's simple elements into a "soup" of ever-heavier stuff, lead study author David Yong, an astronomer based at the Australian National University in Canberra, said in a statement.

"It's an explosive death of the star, [and] nobody's ever discovered that phenomenon before," Yong said.

Now, Yong and his colleagues have found a distant star on the fringes of the Milky Way that contains a bizarre chemical cocktail that can only be explained by this elusive type of explosion, the study authors wrote. The star named SMSS J200322.54-114203.3 (but let’s call it J2 for short) and located about 7,500 light-years from the sun in the halo of the Milky Way, formed about 13 billion years ago, or less than 800 million years after the birth of the universe, according to the researchers. Such stars are the most ancient that still exist.

In their new study, the researchers closely analyzed the star's chemical composition based on the wavelengths of light it emits, using special instruments on the Giant Magellan Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile. Unlike most other known stars dating to this early era, they found that J2 contains extremely low amounts of iron while boasting unusually high amounts of heavier elements such as zinc, uranium, and europium.

Mergers between neutron stars (collapsed husks of giant stars that pack a sun's-worth of mass into an area the size of a city) can explain the presence of these heavier elements in similar stars from the early universe — however, the researchers said, J2 contains so many "extra" heavy elements that even the neutron star merger theory doesn't fit.

According to the authors, the only explanation for all extra-heavy elements is an extra-enormous explosion - a Hypernova amplified by a quick rotation and a powerful magnetic field.

"We now find the observational evidence for the first time directly indicating that there was a different kind of Hypernova producing all stable elements in the periodic table at once — a core-collapse, explosion of a fast-spinning, strongly-magnetized massive star," study co-author Chiaki Kobayashi of the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. said in the statement. "This is the only reason for the results."

This discovery is more than a glittering spectacle; such an incredible explosion must have taken place during the early stages of galaxy formation to lead to the birth of J2. This suggests that hypernovas may have been a major method of star formation at the beginning of the universe, the study concludes. The detection of such ancient and strangely composed stars is required to further expand these results.

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