The most powerful blast ever observed in the universe detonated on Wednesday. That day, a record four gamma-ray bursts were detected by NASA's Swift telescope.
If you knew exactly when and where to look, you could have seen the bright burst with the naked eye, despite its enormous distance of 7.5 billion light years. "This burst definitely has an 'oh wow' flavour," says astrophysicist Ralph Wijers of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Gamma-ray bursts are brief but extremely powerful flashes of high-energy radiation. Theorists think they signal the violent death of very massive, rapidly rotating stars.
Contrary to the wording in the opening line, this didn't occur last Wednesday, but rather that's when the light passed by Earth. The actual burst occurred 7.5 billion light years away. The blast turned out to be 2.5 million times brighter than the most powerful supernova ever observed. Impressive stuff.
http://space.newscientist.com/artic...-powerful-blast-visible-to-the-naked-eye.html
If you knew exactly when and where to look, you could have seen the bright burst with the naked eye, despite its enormous distance of 7.5 billion light years. "This burst definitely has an 'oh wow' flavour," says astrophysicist Ralph Wijers of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Gamma-ray bursts are brief but extremely powerful flashes of high-energy radiation. Theorists think they signal the violent death of very massive, rapidly rotating stars.
Contrary to the wording in the opening line, this didn't occur last Wednesday, but rather that's when the light passed by Earth. The actual burst occurred 7.5 billion light years away. The blast turned out to be 2.5 million times brighter than the most powerful supernova ever observed. Impressive stuff.
http://space.newscientist.com/artic...-powerful-blast-visible-to-the-naked-eye.html
