Record explosion: NASA Swift finds really old 'blast from past'

William Atkins
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 20:30

Science - Space

According to NASA, “Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.”

The detection of this gamma-ray burst, along with other ones at such an early age of the Universe confirms that stars had already developed previous to 630 million years after the Big Bang occurred.

Gamma rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation (light). This high-energy radiation has frequencies that range above 10¹⁹ Hertz, energies of over 100 kiloelectronvolts, and wavelengths of less than 10 picometers.

For additional information on GRB 090423, along with figures of the detection, please go to the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) website of “Tng caught the farthest GRB observed ever.”

TNG is a 3.58-meter telescope on the island of San Miguel de La Palma, in the Canary Islands.

To learn more about gamma-ray bursts, read the Goddard Space Flight Center article "Gamma-Ray Bursts: Introduction to a Mystery."

The article begins by saying, "Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived bursts of gamma-ray photons, the most energetic form of light. At least some of them are associated with a special type of supernovae, the explosions marking the deaths of especially massive stars."

"Lasting anywhere from a few milliseconds to several minutes, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) shine hundreds of times brighter than a typical supernova and about a million trillion times as bright as the Sun, making them briefly the brightest source of cosmic gamma-ray photons in the observable Universe. GRBs are detected roughly once per day from wholly random directions of the sky."