It was a dream come true for astronomers at the University of Oxford, as they witnessed for the first time the final moments of death of a massive star a blast of ultraviolet light signals.

"Astronomers have been dreaming about seeing the first light from the violent death of a star for over 30 years," Kevin Schawinksi, lead researcher of the University of Oxford, was quoted by Space.Com as saying.

"Our observations open up an entirely new avenue for studying the final stages in the lives of massive stars and the physics of supernovae." Schawinksi and his colleagues detected the ultraviolet signal of a hefty star on the verge of explosion which they detail in the June 13 issue of the journal 'Science'.

Usually when astronomers see a supernova, the star has already been destroyed. "It's very hard to tell much about precisely the kind of star that actually died there," Schawinski told SPACE.Com.

"The really cool thing about our observations is this light traveling ahead of the shock wave traveled through the star before it was destroyed." "It's telling us about the properties, the conditions, of the star at the moment it died, but before the shock wave actually disrupted it," he added.

When a massive star, weighing at least 10 suns, runs out of nuclear fuel, it can collapse under its own weight, triggering an explosion called a supernova.

The explosion sends the stellar guts spewing away at 10,000 km/sec in a fireball that's a billion times brighter than the sun, the researchers were quoted as saying.

It is this fireball that scientists have generally observed. What they had not seen earlier were final moments of the star just before the visible explosion.