Re: News: Cosmic blast 7.5 billion years old, seen with naked eye.

On Mar 21, 6:40 pm, Ye Old One <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cosmic blast 7.5 billion years old, seen with naked eye

AFP - Friday, March 21 02:55 am

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080321/tsc-us-space-e123fef.html

WASHINGTON (AFP) - NASA has detected the brightest cosmic explosion
ever recorded -- a massive burst of energy 7.5 billion light years
away that could be seen with the naked eye from Earth, the US space
agency said Thursday.

The explosion, a gamma ray burst older than Earth itself, was
monitored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Swift
satellite and shattered the record for the most distant object seen
without visual aid.

"No other known object or type of explosion could be seen by the naked
eye at such an immense distance," said Swift team member Stephen
Holland of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the eastern state of
Maryland.

"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."

Gamma ray bursts are among the most violent phenomenon produced in the
universe. NASA described them as the most luminous explosions since
the "Big Bang."

The satellite's burst alert telescope discovered the explosion on
Wednesday and located it in the Bootes constellation, with telescopes
on Earth adjusting to witness the afterglow.

NASA measured the explosion as having occured 7.5 billion years ago,
before Earth was formed and more than halfway across the visible
universe.

Until now the most luminous object visible with the naked eye was
galaxy M33, a "relatively short" 2.9 million lightyears from Earth.

The explosion seen Wednesday "blows away every gamma ray burst we've
seen so far," said Neil Gehrels of Goddard Space Flight Center.

Gamma ray bursts occur when huge stars use up all their fuel and their
core collapses, forming black holes or neutron stars that release
bursts of gamma rays, ejecting particles into space at nearly the
speed of light and generating afterglows.

The burst, named GRB 080319B, was among a record four bursts detected
by Swift on Wednesday, the same day of the death of prolific science
fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"Coincidentally, the passing of Arthur C. Clarke seems to have set the
universe ablaze with gamma ray bursts," said Swift team member Judith
Racusin of Penn State University.

--
Bob.

So do we have any YECs who want to tell us what they think it was? I
mean it couldn't be a start exploding 7 billion years ago if the
universe is less than 10,000 years old.

How about it YECs? Who's going to step up and tell us what it was?

.

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