If this had happened a little bit closer to our solar system, we wouldn’t be worrying about the stimulus bill any more: Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency’s Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.

The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said.

“Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts,” astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.

“If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don’t stop for anything — they just bore through and that’s why we can see them from enormous distances,” Reddy said.