how close to earth????

Star explosion blinds satellite
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON - The brightest explosion of a star ever seen temporarily blinded a satellite set up to watch such events, astronomers said Wednesday.

The gamma-ray burst and explosion of X-rays that followed came from a star that died 5 billion years ago, far beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, NASA and British scientists said. It took this long for the radiation to reach the Swift orbiting observatory.

The bright X-ray burst blinded Swift on June 21, and the observatory's software ignored it as if it were an anomaly, the astronomers said.

"The intensity of these X-rays was unexpected and unprecedented," Neil Gehrels, Swift's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.

Gehrels said the burst, named GRB 100621A, is the brightest X-ray source that Swift has detected since it started looking for them in 2005.

"Just when we were beginning to think that we had seen everything that gamma-ray bursts could throw at us, this burst came along to challenge our assumptions about how powerful their X-ray emissions can be," Gehrels said.


"The burst was so bright when it first erupted that our data-analysis software shut down," said Phil Evans of Britain's University of Leicester, who discovered the burst when he was going through some recorded data from Swift.

"So many photons were bombarding the detector each second that it just couldn't count them quickly enough. It was like trying to use a rain gauge and a bucket to measure the flow rate of a tsunami."

When a star explodes, radiation travels at the speed of light in all directions. Gamma rays reach Earth first, followed by X-rays.

This particular one was 140 times brighter than the brightest continuous X-ray source in the sky -- a nearby neutron star.

Source

It is very far. But I can no longer see the gamma-rays burst sky at grb.sonoma.edu since they started using Silverlight and I am using Linux.
Tullio

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Thanks for letting me know how far away this was. What i find fastening is the fact it came from 5 billion years ago, very close to creation.

I found another article with a picture.

http://geeked.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=1417
And then the universe said ‘Hah!’ NASA’s Swift satellite can’t believe its eyes when it spots the brightest X-ray glow from a gamma ray burst outside our galaxy


Three weeks ago, a distant point in space in another galaxy released a blast of X-rays so bright even the satellite that saw it first didn’t believe its eyes. Then Phil Evans came home from vacation and got very, very lucky.

“One of the things I personally like most about doing research,” he says, “is when you discover something brand new — even if it’s ‘just’ the brightest X-ray object that we think we’ve ever seen — there’s a moment when there is only one person in the universe who knows about this. And sometimes you get to be that one person.”

~more~


Swift's X-Ray Telescope captured this image of GRB 100621A

What i find fastening is the fact it came from 5 billion years ago, very close to creation.

If you meant the creation of the Earth, that would be close to the time.

The creation of the universe happened 15 to 18 billion years ago by the last estimates I remember.

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I fight them because they are fascists.
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A riot is the language of the unheard. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

What i find fastening is the fact it came from 5 billion years ago, very close to creation.

If you meant the creation of the Earth, that would be close to the time.

The creation of the universe happened 15 to 18 billion years ago by the last estimates I remember.

You are so right. Brain Freeze. Sorry, closer to earth.

Even a nova can emit gamma rays, says NASA:
gamma burst

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