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NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has captured footage from the flash of an exploding star for the first time.

Called the "shock breakout", it occurs during a supernova - the death of a star .

In this case, it was from a star called KSN2011d, roughly 500 times the size of our own sun and around 1.2 billion light years away from Earth.

A second star, KSN2011a, also exploded whilst in Kepler's view but the "shock breakout" wasn't observed because of gas on the star's surface.

"To put their size into perspective, Earth's orbit about our sun would fit comfortably within these colossal stars,” said Peter Garnavich, an astrophysics professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana who led the team that discovered the footage.

(Image: NASA)

They analysed light captured by Kepler every 30 minutes over a three-year period from 500 distant galaxies, searching some 50 trillion stars. Ostensibly, they were looking for signs of life, but it doesn't hurt to come across a cataclysmic space explosion.

“In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky,” said Garnavich.

“You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and Kepler's vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began.”

(Image: NASA) (Image: NASA)

The type of supernova witnessed by the team is classified as a Type II - when a star runs out of nuclear fuel and gravity causes its core to collapse.

"All heavy elements in the universe come from supernova explosions. For example, all the silver, nickel, and copper in the earth and even in our bodies came from the explosive death throes of stars," said Steve Howell, project scientist for NASA's Kepler and K2 missions at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

"Life exists because of supernovae," he said.