Starship Asterisk*

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Ann wrote:Only 470 million light-years away? That's just a bit farther away than the Coma Cluster, about 1½ times farther away. This gamma-ray burst feels uncomfortably nearby!

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APOD Robot wrote: Earths Major Telescopes Investigate GRB 130427A

Explanation: Previously recorded images from the RAPTOR full-sky monitors were scanned and a very bright optical counterpart -- magnitude 7.4 -- was found 50 seconds before the Swift trigger.

• What the heck is that all about

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/21mar_nakedeye/ wrote:

GRB 130427A magnitude of +7.4 at 1.44 billion parsecs [size=150] = [color=#0000FF]Absolute magnitude of -38.4 (or [u]solar bright at 7,000 ly[/u])[/color] [/size]

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<<March 21, 2008: A powerful gamma ray burst detected March 19th by NASA's Swift satellite has shattered the record for the most distant object that could be seen with the naked eye. The burst was named GRB 080319B and registered between 5 and 6 on the visual magnitude scale used by astronomers.

Later that evening, the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas measured the burst's redshift at 0.94. A redshift is a measure of the distance to an object. A redshift of 0.94 translates into a distance of 7.5 billion light years, meaning the explosion took place 7.5 billion years ago, a time when the universe was less than half its current age and Earth had yet to form. This is more than halfway across the visible universe.

"No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked eye at such an immense distance," says Swift science team member Stephen Holland of Goddard. "If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time, they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid."

Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas to incandescent visibility. It is this gaseous "afterglow" which was visible to the human eye on March 19th.>>

Stargazer_MD wrote:Did it happen today? Putting the date of occurrence will help an idiot such as me.

John Champagne wrote:If a miniature black hole were produced by a curious species involved in high-energy physics experiments, and that black hole ended up swallowing the planet that was home to such species, what kind of signature would such an implosion produce?

Even if micro black holes should be formed in these collisions, it is expected that they would evaporate in about 10⁻²⁵ seconds, posing no threat to the Earth.

neufer wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]bright optical counter part :?: [/color][/b]

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APOD Robot wrote: Earths Major Telescopes Investigate GRB 130427A

Explanation: Previously recorded images from the RAPTOR full-sky monitors were scanned and a very bright optical counterpart -- magnitude 7.4 -- was found 50 seconds before the Swift trigger.

• What the heck is that all about

“Our Galaxy’s black hole may be cooking its dinner right in front of Herschel’s eyes.”