A group of researchers claim they've found the most distant explosion ever detected, a pulse of high energy radiation sent by a disintegrating star near the very edge of the observable universe.

The stellar blast was first spotted by a NASA satellite in April 2009, but researchers announced this week that they have since gathered data placing it more than 13 billion light years away - meaning that the event took place when the universe was still in its infancy.

University of Warwick astronomer Dr Andrew Levan, who was one of the first members of the team to spot an exploding star.

Andrew Levan, one of the scientists behind the discovery, said this blast from the past blew open a window onto the universe's early years, showing that massive stars were already dying within the first few hundred million years of the birth of the universe.

This particular explosion wasn't a supernova but a gamma ray burst, the name given to a short but powerful pulse of high energy radiation. Such bursts, thought to result from the collapse of massive stars into black holes, shoot jets of energy across the universe.