Earth hit by blast from dying star that's so powerful it has scientists baffled

Earth has been hit by a blast of energy so powerful that scientists have been unable to explain it.

And no, it's not because someone had beans for dinner, it's actually from a dying star located some 1,000 lightyears away from Earth.

While most of us could be forgiven for not having noticed this enormous pulse of energy, if humans were directly exposed to it we'd be more sizzled than a British holidaymaker on a Spanish beach.

Scientists detected the intense waves of gamma rays using a high array of telescopes located in Namibia, and are thought to have originated in the Vela Pulsar.

This pulsar has been compared to the mask of the phantom of the opera in its ghoulish appearance.

Pulsars occur when an enormous star explodes into a supernova, only to then collapse in on itself.

YouTube / NASA

This only occurs when it's a particularly large star. The star will explode out into a red supergiant and then a supernova.

It can then go on to become either a pulsar, or the more widely known black hole.

Needless to say The Sun is nowhere near large enough to get to this stage, being a pretty average star in more or less every respect, apart from sustaining life as we know it of course.

When The Beatles were releasing Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band back in 1967, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was becoming the first person to observe pulsars.

And before anyone asks, no this is not a sign that aliens are trying to get in touch, according to study author Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France.

YouTube / NASA

He told MailOnline: "It is true that when they were first discovered back in 1967, the sources were named LGM1 and LGM2 for little green men, but that was almost a joke.

"We know for sure pulsars are corpses of massive stars and there is no need for any alien intelligence to produce the signals that we see on Earth."

HESS scientist and study author Emma de Oña Wilhelmi described pulsars, saying: "These dead stars are almost entirely made up of neutrons and are incredibly dense.

"A teaspoon of their material has a mass of more than five billion tonnes, or about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza."