With the help of high-quality pictures captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers have concluded that three supernovae exploded in dark emptiness of intergalactic space hundreds of light-years away from their closest cosmic neighbors.

Galaxies containing hundreds of billions of stars are also the home of most supernovae. And chances are bright for one to explode per century per galaxy.

However, location of these lonely supernovae was between galaxies in three large clusters of several thousand galaxies each. The nearest distance at which the stars neighbors are located was probably 300 light-years away. The distance is 100 times farther than our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years distant.

Each of the supernovae belonged to clusters of galaxies located about 1 billion light years from earth. Melissa Graham, a Berkeley researcher, said chances are high that any planets orbiting these exploding stars were destroyed in the blast.

“It would have been a fairly dark background indeed, populated only by the occasional faint and fuzzy blobs of the nearest and brightest cluster galaxies", Graham said in a statement.

Researchers said that they have got a deeper insight into what exists in the vast empty spaces between galaxies, thanks to such rare solitary supernovae. Researchers are also confident that they would be able to figure out the mechanism behind formation of galaxy clusters and evolution throughout the history of the universe.