Satellite Detects Massive Explosion

[MBA_UIU]

Just saw this thought I would post the link.<br /><br />Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite said yesterday that they have detected the most distant explosion ever discovered in the universe, the collapse into a black hole of a massive star about 12.6 billion light-years from Earth.<br /><br />The event occurred about 1.1 billion years after the big bang, the explosion that created the universe an estimated 13.7 billion years ago, the scientists calculated. The only more distant objects ever detected are a quasar and a single galaxy, both about 12.7 billion light-years away.<br /><br /> Massive Black Hole <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong><font color="#0000ff"><br /><br /> <br /><img id="268587ce-7170-4b41-a87b-8cd443f9351a" src="http://sitelife.space.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/6/8/268587ce-7170-4b41-a87b-8cd443f9351a.Large.jpg" alt="blog post photo" /><br /></font></strong></p> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

I was just reading about that. That is extraordinarily cool. This Swift mission is paying off enormously. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>

 

[tom_hobbes]

To have been discovered so <i>swiftly</i> this kind of thing must be potentially visible from the Earth fairly regularly, surely. We now have the 'eyes' to see such events, so we see them. It just makes me wonder how much we've missed over the centuries before we were able to actually observe such things. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font size="2" color="#339966"> I wish I could remember<br /> But my selective memory<br /> Won't let me</font><font size="2" color="#99cc00"> </font><font size="3" color="#339966"><font size="2">- </font></font><font size="1" color="#339966">Mark Oliver Everett</font></p><p> </p> </div>

 

[spaceinvador_old]

That's cool! What do we gain from knowing such a thing?

 

[CalliArcale]

Yes, Tom, GRBs are sometimes detectable from the ground. That in itself deserves note, because gamma rays have a hard time penetrating our atmosphere -- it's a testament to how fantastically powerful these things are. Usually, however, gamma rays are actually detected indirectly by teh muons they produce in the upper atmosphere. (At least, I think that's how my brother explained it. His thesis is all about that process, and he was explaining it to me the last time he was up in the Twin Cities. I have GOT to get him to log onto this board sometime!)<br /><br />To get a really effective look at GRBs, you have to get above the atmosphere. GRBs had been detected by research aircraft and balloons, but those studies don't last all that long and are somewhat constrained in where they can look. When the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was placed into orbit by the Space Shuttle, it represented a major step forward because it could detect gamma rays continually for years. And it did. They plotted out where GRBs were coming from; this was important to work out how far away they were and therefore how powerful they were. It was expected that they would be concentrated along the disk of the Milky Way, indicating they were part of it. But instead they appeared totally at random all over the entire sky, indicating that they were extremely distant. Once somebody was finally lucky enough to catch one in time to point an optical telescope at it, they were able to get a redshift value, and they are unbelievably distant -- going right back into the Dark Ages of the Universe. To cut a long story short, the Swift spacecraft was conceived to get more and better data about GRBs. The objective is always to detect them in time to point instruments at the spot, but normally that takes minutes to hours and many GRBs only last seconds before they fade too much to be useful. Swift carries an optical telescope, an infrared telescope, and an x-ray telescope in addition to its gamma ray <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>