One of the brightest cosmic explosions in 20 years shot out a billion years' worth of sunshine through a pencil-thin beam

It first looked strangely faint. Then astronomers did the geometry. A gamma-ray burst recorded in March — among the brightest seen in two decades — was not weak at all: its energy was funnelled into a jet no thicker, relatively speaking, than a pencil, containing about a billion years' worth of the Sun's total energy output. The findings, led by radio astronomer Roberto Ricci at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, explain the burst's odd appearance and sharpen how scientists read the deaths of the universe's most massive stars.