Astronomers have confirmed a blast of gamma radiation spotted earlier this year was the death throes of a star billions of light years away from earth.

It is the most distant object in space ever to be detected and the research has just been published in the journal Nature.

Professor Nial Tanvir led the international team that studied the ancient explosion's fallout says it is a record-breaking discovery.

"The thing that we detected is something called a gamma ray burst, it's a kind of exploding star and these explosions are so bright, so incredibly bright, brighter than anything else we know of in the universe that you can see them very far away," he said.

"It's actually a complicated procedure to see the thing. You detect them initially with a satellite which picks up the gamma ray radiation from this explosion, which is happening far across the universe.

"Then we have to use telescopes on the earth which are state of the art, the biggest most powerful telescopes that we have on the earth to make observations of the burst as it sort of fades away."

Dr Tanvir says the actual explosion would have happened over 14 billion years ago.

"The really interesting thing in cosmology is that when we look out across the universe at great distances, the light that we're seeing has taken in some cases billions of years to reach us travelling across the universe," he said.

"So we're actually looking backwards in time, and what, in this particular case, the era that we're reaching to is about 600 million years after the start of the universe itself and the big bang. It's about 14.1 billion years."

To measure how far away the explosion occurred, the astronomers look at the light's red shift.

"It's a sort of change in the character of the light as it takes place, the light has come so far across the universe to us," he said.

"By measuring the red shift, you can turn that round and you can infer distance or a time."

He says looking at explosions in distant galaxies opens a window into the "dark ages of the universe".

"As we look far away across the universe, we're looking backwards in time and there comes a point where you couldn't see any further, and the reason is not because of the technology just not being up to it, but because basically you look all the way back in time to the big bang itself and so that's an era we can never see," he said.

"But the first galaxies that formed after the big bang, the first stars they formed maybe 100 million or 200 million years or so after the big bang.

"For several hundred million years we think those first galaxies started very slowly... to re-ionise the universe to in fact turn the gas between the galaxies from a cold neutral gas into an ionised plasma.

"So the whole process we refer to the kind of dark era before there really were any stars at all, through to these first stars which changed the state of the gas in the universe."

Dr Tanvir says that using power telescopes the astronomers have been able to 'map out' most of the universe, up until these early stages.

"The final area in our map of the universe that we have to still fill in is this dark age region when the first stars were turning on," he said.

"So I think that's why we're particularly excited about this breakthrough, it's not just a matter of breaking a record, but it's pushing us finally into this era when all this early activity was taking place."