Representing one of the brightest stellar explosions seen this year, the GRB 070125 was discovered on the 25th of January with the Palomar robotic space telescope, operated by the Inter-Planetary Network. It is not the intensity of the glow that seems to present too much interest to astronomers since supernova explosions several times greater in brightness have been observed over the years, but rather the location where the death of the star occurred.

Usually, stars are born inside massive clouds of gas and dust that collapse on themselves. Furthermore, the gas cloud is generally large enough to spawn several stars, or even a galaxy. However, the newly discovered supernova explosion took place nearly 90,000 light years away from the closest galaxy, distance equivalent to nearly the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.

Situated in the direction of the Gemini constellation, about 9.4 billion light years away from Earth, the explosion presents a long-duration gamma-ray burst or GRB for short, that is usually emitted during the explosion of a massive star. Massive stars producing these GRB emissions often have short lives as they burn their hydrogen relatively fast due to the increased pressure in their cores, averaging about 1 million years, while our Sun is at least 4.7 billion years old and scientists predict it will continue to shine for as much as 5 billion years.

However, while massive stars are quite common in the universe, they mostly form in the proximity of other stars and don't wander through empty space alone precisely because of their short lives, thus the question is how could such a massive star form so far away from the closest star accumulation?

Further analysis of the images captured by Palomar after the intensity of the glow decreased confirmed the fact that there are now galaxies close to the star and no traces of any gas clouds between GRB 070125 and Earth.

Current models of star formation show that stars always form inside or in the proximity of a galaxy, thus scientists are taking in consideration the fact that the massive star might have formed in the outer regions of a galaxy, during gravitational interactions with another companion, and got ejected from the system. The Hubble space telescope has already been given the mission to find evidence of any tidal debris left behind the interacting galaxy to test their idea.