|
Friday October 30, 2009
|
This is starting to become a regular event: Astronomers have detected what appears to be the most distant object anyone has seen from Earth, according to NPR.
The discovery, which appears in the current issue of Nature, involves a gamma ray burst, which is essentially a type of exploding star (visible as the tiny red dot in the center of the photo). "These things are brighter than anything else we know of in the universe," said Nial Tanvir, a University of Leicester astronomer who was on one of the two teams involved in the discovery. "In principle we can see them very far away but they're incredibly rare."
So here's the tech portion: the astronomers used NASA's SWIFT satellite to find the gamma ray burst. In this case, it turns out to be from a star that collapsed when the universe was "only" 600 million years old; that's 13.1 billion years ago. The light took that long to reach us, and finally arrived on April 23rd of this year--and is the most distant object ever detected, according to the report.
"It was absolutely thrilling -- a spine-tingling moment, actually," Tanvir said in the article. (Thanks to Warren W for sending this in.) (Image credit: A.J.Levan and N.R.Tanvir/Nature)
|
|
|
Mixx It
Digg It
Stumble
More...
October 31, 2009 6:02 PM
With the universe expanding faster than the speed of light there will be gamma ray bursts that we, from earth, will be unable to detect with present technology. How's that for distance?
October 31, 2009 11:21 PM
Sorry. I had Taco Bell for lunch. My bad.
November 1, 2009 1:25 PM
600 million years old!! How often does this happen? How many explosions have they missed?