Gigantic Explosion in Space

Huge gamma-ray blast spotted 12.2 bln light-years from earth


WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said.
The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of , astrophysicists said.
"Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP.
"If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said.
A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics determined that the huge gamma-ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away.
The sun is eight light minutes from Earth, and Pluto is 12 light hours away.
Taking into account the huge distance from earth of the burst, scientists worked out that the blast was stronger than 9,000 supernovae -- powerful explosions that occur at the end of a star's lifetime -- and that the gas jets emitting the initial gamma rays moved at nearly the speed of light.
"This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date," a statement issued by the US Department of Energy said.
are the universe's most luminous explosions, which astronomers believe occur when run out of nuclear fuel and collapse.
Long bursts, which last more than two seconds, occur in massive stars that are undergoing collapse, while short bursts lasting less than two seconds occur in smaller stars.
In short gamma-ray bursts, stars simply explode and form supernovae, but in long bursts, the enormous bulk of the star leads its core to collapse and form a blackhole, into which the rest of the star falls.
As the star's core collapses into the black hole, jets of material blast outward, boring through the collapsing star and continuing into space where they interact with gas previously shed by the star, generating bright afterglows that fade with time.
"It's thought that something involved in spinning up and collapsing into that blackhole in the center is what drives these jets. No one really has figured that out. The jets rip through the star and the supernova follows after the jets," Reddy said.
Studying gamma-ray bursts allows scientists to "sample an individual star at a distance where we can't even see galaxies clearly," Reddy said.
Observing the massive explosions could also lift the veil on more of space's enigmas, including those raised by the burst spotted by Fermi, such as a "curious time delay" between its highest and lowest energy emissions.
Such a time lag has been seen in only one earlier burst, and "may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," said Stanford University physicist Peter Michelson, the chief investigator on Fermi's large area telescope.
"Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them. In a few years, we'll have a fairly good sample of bursts and may have some answers," Michelson said.
The Fermi telescope and detect "in the order of 1,000 gamma-ray bursts a year, or a burst every 100,000 years in a given galaxy," said Reddy.
Astrophysicists estimate there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
The was developed by NASA in collaboration with the US Department of Energy and partners including academic institutions in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.


Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090219/sc_afp/sciencespaceastronomy


Yea, it has the power over 9,000 supernovas, I can just see the over 9,000 jokes that are to come.....

 

what's the scouter say about its power level?
Its over 9000!!!
What 9000?!

you asked for it

Wonder what would happen to a planet blasted by that many gamma rays.

 

-Wow! so are we alone out there?? (X-files background music plays....)
-Nice info, so.. .. are we... alone?? ....

 

Well whatever caused that explosion sure isn't alive now

 

Or anything remotely close to it.

What they speak of is called a hypernova.

 

no, hypernova is the stregnth of a 1000 supernovae, this is closer to an ultranova


i wonder what caused this

 

im guessing its one Mutant that feeds on the likes of those planets.. with the aid from one shining surfer... and we're next??

 

Or maybe some sort of "THING" is devouring every planet on the universe.

 

i have the ultimate galactus trilogy in my bookcase.


Ultimate version is better then the weird one

 

The strength may merely be a result of the stars original mass, the process of how it happened, that being so large that at the same time as the core collasped into a black hole, the outer layers of the star were exploding is called a hyper nova.

no matter how strong it it..

 

oh, i just thought you used that ladder of strength thing

 

Something I don't get--- its 12 billion light years away, so wouldn't the thing have happened 12 billion years ago?

 

Not necessarily, because it is not regular light that we are viewing but gamma rays with an x-ray telescope. Gamma rays also penetrate matter and they said the article the reason we were able to see this from since a enormous distance etc is because of the nature of the gamma rays.

 

yup

The explosion is not so bigger.. the problem is that when a big star collapses to produce a super nova, the super nova explosion dispersed energy in all directions. But when a bigger star collapses and this star is has a rotation speed, the explosion concentrate in 2 jets of gamma energy leaving a black hole. If we are in that jets direction, we can thougt that is like a supernova but thousands of times more powerful.

 

Wow, pretty scary. Imagine what would have happened if we were there...

 

The end of humanity as we know it.

 

How could it happen 12 billon years ago.

 

No matter how fast it is, it still takes light time to travel through space. Since it was VERY far away, it might've taken light (as in the image of the explosion) even that long to reach us

 

ScienSmart just concluded that the blast was caused by Tassadar's self sacrifce against the Overmind.

I wonder... If it really is anything to do with aliens... blowing **** up...
eek :s

 

Light has speed... and the light of that exploson reached us now...