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Nasa has captured the early flash of an exploding star in visible light for the first time.

The Kepler Space Telescope witnessed the shockwave of visible light emitted from two massive stars, KSN 2011a and KSN 2011d, which are 300 and 500 times the size of the sun and between 700 million and 1.2 billion light years from Earth, as they exploded while in view of the Kepler Space Telescope.


The flash of light, dubbed a "shock breakout", lasted 20 minutes and was 130,000,000 times brighter than our Sun. "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," said Peter Garnavich the research leader, from the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

Nasa said the two supernovae it saw matched up with mathematical models of the explosions. "While both explosions delivered a similar energetic punch, no shock breakout was seen in the smaller of the supergiants," the space agency said in a blog post. The research from the team behind the discovery is due to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The brightness of a supernova event, relative to the sun Nasa Ames/W. Stenzel

The Kepler telescope was launched in March 2009 and was designed to survey a portion of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets that are near the habitable zone.


Since its deployment it has been responsible for finding more than 1,000 exoplanets, although scientists are still looking at up to 4,700 additional candidates. The explosion was seen in data gathered during the first part of Kepler's mission, which ended in 2013 after the spacecraft's reaction wheels failed to keep it steady. The second part of the Kepler mission, K2, has confirmed 38 planets so far.

Tom Barclay, who is a director of the Kepler and K2 guest observer office, said that the findings hint at further insights to come from Kepler. "While Kepler cracked the door open on observing the development of these spectacular events, K2 will push it wide open observing dozens more supernovae," he said.

In one of its most famous finds, Nasa announced in June 2015 that the telescope had discovered a 'second Earth' deep in space. The planet, Kepler-452, was described as a a slightly larger and older Earth. Modelling from Nasa scientists suggested that it is a rocky world, which orbits its star once every 385 days.