A cosmic explosion that seems to have come out of nowhere—thousands of light-years from the nearest collection of stars—has left astronomers baffled.
The blast, one of the brightest this year, was detected by spacecraft from the Inter-Planetary Network on Jan. 25 and satellites were used to pinpoint its location to a region of the sky in the constellation Gemini.
Because the massive stars believed to produce GRBs live fast and die young, they don’t have time to wander from their birthplace, which is usually dense clouds of gas and dust inside of galaxies. So the explosion raise the perplexing question of how a massive star could be found so far from a galaxy.
“If a massive star died far away from any galaxy, the key question is, how did it manage to be born there?” said team member Derek Fox of Penn State.