The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA‘s planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope.

The video begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 hundred times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun.

When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to collapses under gravity. A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the star’s layers. The shockwave initially breaks through the star’s visible surface as a series of finger-like plasma jets.

Only 20 minute later the full fury of the shockwave reaches the surface and the doomed star blasts apart as a supernova explosion.

The shock breakout was caught in 2011, but the discovery was made public on Monday after the research paper reporting the discovery’s findings was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.