A super-massive star that exploded more than 240 million light years away from us has led scientists to believe we might have witnessed the first supernova powered by antimatter.

The super-massive sun died with a burst of energy that was 100 times more powerful than any typical supernova death recorded until now. SN 2006gy exploded in a galaxy situated quite close to us (in terms of the vastness of our Universe that is “only” 240 million light years away) called NGC 1260.

The first signs of the explosion were caught here on Earth in September 2006 using NASA’s Chandra X-Ray space observatory and a handful of other ground-based telescopes at Lick Observatory in California and Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

What amazed scientists was the fact that the light coming from the explosion lasted inexplicably long- more than 70 days of increasing glowing- with a peak emission estimated at more than 50 billion Suns worth of light. It is considered that most of the supernovae outshine the entire galaxy where they are hosted for a brief period of time during their violent death, and SN 2006gy was no exception: before slowly fading away into a massive-super heated cloud of plasma, the giant celestial body emitted 10 times more light than the entire NGC 1260.

"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley, who led ground-based observations of the supernova. "We were astonished to see how bright it got and how long it lasted."

The finding will be included in the next issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is said to be the first clear evidence of a new type of supernova explosions that are common only to super-massive stars. It also suggests that the initial celestial behemoths that have populated and illuminated the early Universe might have also died in similar conditions.

"We may have witnessed a modern-day version of how the first generation of the most massive stars ended their lives," Filippenko said.