Record-breaking solar flare described - UPI.com A NASA space telescope detected the highest-energy light ever measured in an eruption on the sun during a powerful solar blast, the space agency has reported. This image from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) shows how the entire sky looked on March 7 in the light of high-energy gamma rays. The sun, in the lower part of the image, was the source of the highest-energy rays. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration GREENBELT, Md., June 11 (UPI) -- A NASA space telescope detected the highest-energy light ever measured in an eruption on the sun during a powerful solar blast, the space agency has reported. The powerful solar flare, observed March 7 by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, produced such an outpouring of gamma rays -- a form of light with even greater energy than X-rays -- that the sun briefly became the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky, NASA said Monday. "For most of Fermi's four years in orbit, its LAT saw the sun as a faint, steady gamma-ray source thanks to the impacts of high-speed particles called cosmic rays," Nicola Omodei, an astrophysicist at Stanford University, said. Now we're beginning to see what the sun itself can do. The March flare produced high-energy gamma rays for about 20 hours, two and a half times longer than any event on record, researchers said. Solar eruptions are increasing as the sun moves toward the peak of its roughly 11-year-long activity cycle, expected in mid-2013, they said.