The night of March 18 to 19, 2008, was cloudy across much of North America, but the skies were clear in Mexico and the southwestern United States. If you had looked high in the sky at just the right time that night, you might have seen a faint dot appear for about 30 seconds in the constellation Boötes. This light was the flash from the collapse of a supermassive star about 10 billion light-years away, [*] thousands of times more distant than Andromeda. It set a new record for the most distant known object visible to the naked eye. These collapsing stars emit jets of energy from their north
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