A dying star, discovered thanks to images captured by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Haleakala, has provided scientists with a glimpse into a galaxy about 9.5 billion light-years away.

"It’s like someone turned on a flashlight in a dark room and suddenly allowed us to see, for a short time, what this far-off galaxy looks like, what it is composed of," said Edo Berger, leader of an international research team that used the exploding star’s light as a probe to study gas conditions in the space between the host galaxy’s stars.

The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal. Berger, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that conditions around the distant galaxy appear "reassuringly normal" compared with our own corner of space.

Team members hailed the discovery as evidence of the Pan-STARRS project’s long-term potential.

"Pan-STARRS is pioneering a new era in deep, wide-field, time-critical astronomy," said John Tonry, a supernovae researcher with the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy and one of the study’s authors.