A mysterious blast of light spotted earlier this year near the constellation Leo was actually the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, and was triggered by an extremely powerful stellar explosion, new research reports.

On April 27, several satellites — including NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope — observed an unusually bright burst of gamma radiation. The explosion unleashed an energetic jet of particles that traveled at nearly the speed of light, researchers said.

"We suddenly saw a gamma-ray burst that was extremely bright — a monster gamma-ray burst," study co-author Daniele Malesani, an astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said in a statement. "This [was] one of the most powerful gamma-ray bursts we have ever observed with the Swift satellite." [Top 10 Strangest Things in Space]

The gamma-ray burst was described in a series of studies published online today (Nov. 21) in the journal Science.

Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful type of explosions in the universe and typically mark the destruction of a massive star. The original stars are too faint to be seen, but the supernova explosions that signal a star's death throes can cause violent bursts of gamma radiation, researchers said.

Gamma-ray bursts are usually short but extremely bright. Still, ground-based telescopes have a tough time observing them because Earth's atmosphere absorbs the gamma radiation.

The extremely bright gamma-ray burst seen earlier this year, officially dubbed GRB 130472A, occurred in a galaxy 3.6 billion light-years away from Earth, which, though still far away, is less than half the distance at which gamma-ray bursts have previously been seen. This closer proximity to Earth enabled astronomers to confirm for the first time that one object can simultaneously create a powerful GRB and a supernova explosion.