GRB From Beyond

A little over a week ago, a rare event occurred and was captured by NASA's Swift satellite. The event was actually so rare, that nothing with that magnitude had ever been detected before. I'm speaking of a gamma ray burst (GRB) that was visible with the naked eye.

Gamma Ray Bursts are not uncommon, about 2 are detected every week. The oddity here was how far away the burst was from Earth. The distance was measured at about halfway across the observable universe. That is 7.5 billion light years, and it was visible with no telescope, no binoculars. Nothing even remotely close to this distance has ever been observable with the naked eye.

There are two explanations, either this was an extremely powerful burst, or the jets from the GRB was extremely narrow and happened to be directed toward Earth. Actually, when this GRB occurred, the Earth was not even in existence, 7.5 billion years ago. Pretty interesting to imagine this.

This burst came as one of 4 GRB's detected that day, setting a new record for GRB detections for the Swift satellite. Coincidentally this record GRB detection came the day after Arthur C. Clarke died.

If you want to read more on this check out NASA.gov


Godspeed