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Furthest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever Observed
jd writes "The SWIFT team have announced the furthest-ever observed super-massive gamma-ray burst (from 13 billion light years away). The burst was observed on the 6th of September and lasted for 3 minutes - long enough for a number of other telescopes to home in on the gigantic explosion. The distance is only barely within the reaches of the observable universe. The idea of the SWIFT telescope and follow-up observations is that they will discover both the cause of the bursts and the consequences to the star."
When supernovae occur you can see them. Are they the brightest visible object? What would this look like if it were light instead of gamma? Or even alpha or beta?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
How do we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old? It was recently discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating as time goes by. Assuming this change in acceleration has been the case all along, doesn't that really fudge with the numbers we used to estimate the universe's age?
I *think* we observed, or tried to observe, this burst from our local observatory WIRO. At its high redshift, we probably just got limits with the optical camera that was on the telescope. I'll have to check with my student Cassandra Paul who was on and targeted a burst last week. They released some kind of circular.
As a quasar guy, I'm excited about this result but happy a quasar still holds the redshift record.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
The software you saw at the Hayden might have been something to do with Partiview:
This post is strictly my own opinion and not necessarily that of my employer.
The distance is only barely within the reaches of the observable universe.
I remember hearing this phrase before, and hearing an explanation, but it didn't make sense. Can you explain this in idiot terms? Something about some things are never actually going to get to us because they're too far away, and that represents the boundries of our reachable universe?
~Will
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The big bang (I don't believe it myself!) happened 'everywhere' - not just at one point in space. That's the theory anyway.
Ok, so, according to wikipedia, if something happened in the universe 78 billion light years away, it would just now be reaching earth, and if it happened 79 billion light years away from earth, we wouldn't know about it yet.
And then, it's argued that everything beyond this horizon doesn't exist? So, the universe (according to our understanding) is a constantly growing sphere with earth in the center?
It just seems wierd. I mean, I know that scientifically, if you can't observe something, for your given system, that thing doesn't exist. However, if you drove your Heart of Gold, or USS Enterprise, or whatever, to 78 billion light years from earth, and then went 10 feet further, the Universe is still there...
Wierd.
Thanks for the article links, too.
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In consequence, although the absolute upper limit of the observable Universe is C * (age of Universe), the actual upper limit must be lower than this - though probably not by very much.
In fact, when very early structures formed, the density was still quite significant. The boundary of the observable Universe, then, can't be uniform but will resemble something closer to rather lumpy rice pudding.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I Am Not an Astronomer/Cosmologist
"If this massive gamma-ray burst resulted in a black hole, then how did the light escape enough to reach us here on earth,"
Only stuff inside the event horizon after a star has collapsed that far gets trapped. The bits of the implosion/explosion outside that radius gets out. Newton dictates that whatever pushes in against the core of a star to collapse it into a black hole also pushes the pusher in the opposite direction.
"I would love to see some pictures or even video of this event,"
A new pinpoint of light appears, then goes away after 3 minutes (assuming you can see gamma rays). Even the most powerful telescopes looking at Alpha Centauri only sees a pinpoint of light. They can get brighter or dimmer, but never "larger."
"Another question comes to mind, what if Earth and the entire Milky Way Galaxy itself, was actually trapped inside of a giant blackhole???"
Things closer to the center wouldn't be visible to us, because the light would be going the other way. Things farther away than us would only be visible as high-energy stuff, with other galaxies probably blue-shifted well into the gamma radiation range of the EM spectrum. Laterally, we might be able to see ourselves with powerful enough telescopes.
"yet the black hole swallowed up a majority of the explosion and what we see, is just a small glimpse of it?"
It's an all-too-big part of it. If the gamma ray burst that we saw was in our galaxy and still pointed at us, we'd be dead.
I am a computer engineering kid. Sexy hardware gets me hot, tight software that climbs up to a level i've not pondered is sexy to me ... or even down to a level i don't play in.
... just for a second imagine the roiling, nuclear fire that churns inside each one ... the amount of matter transformed into energy by each one, each second you watch?
.. and marvel your face off.
But i have to ask, do you ever just look at the sky at night?
Do you? Do you really sink deep into your mind the vast firestorm that goes on above your head every day and nigh? Do you look at the stars and
Do you?
Break your mind for a second and imagine the scale of this place your little planet wanders around
We've had NASA support for GRB followup at Wyoming's observatory, WIRO. We have someone on call every night who gets an alert seconds after SWIFT localizes a GRB. They in turn call the WIRO observers on that night who finish their current exposure and then point at the GRB field. When everything is working, and the right instruments are on (e.g. imagers), and the weather is clear, we can start taking data within five minutes of the GRB. It's kind of cool, especially given that the system is not robotic.
The space telescopes, in general, are much more difficult to reprogram quickly aside from the systems like SWIFT designed to detect these GRBs.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Let's see...
13.7 billion minus 13 billion is 700 million.
So, this thing blew up 700 million years after the big bang. Matter doesn't travel faster than light, supposedly, so this thing blew up *no more than* 700 million light years from where the big bang occurred, right?
But... if it supposedly happened 13 billion LY away, that makes the center of the universe 12.3 billion LY away from us, at most (assuming *we* are moving away from the center at light speed). Assuming we and this explosion were on opposite sides of the big bang, that's 1.4 billion LY apart when it happened, right? Hrm, if it happened 13 billion LY away from where we *are*, and 1.4 billion LY from where we *were*, then the radiation took 11.6 billion years to "catch up" to us. Now, those numbers assumed we're moving at max velocity, but we're obviously not or the light would never have caught us. But... if we're moving more slowly, then all those numbers get smaller...And if the numbers get smaller, that might put the center of the universe *past* where that explosion occurred! Can someone draw a picture explaining the relationships between us and the explosion when it actually happened, and where we and this exploded object are now, and include some speed and time estimates? I'm really, terribly confused, as the NASA numbers just don't seem to add up to me.
But no matter what... this tells me that the farthest we can possibly "see" is just barely (if you call 700 million light years "barely") past the center of the universe!
Is that right? Can we really only "see" half of the universe?
As someone with a science background don't make the erroneous assumption that i'm limited in my knowledge. That being said your response (completely lacking in any topic foundation) is the same one that academics have been spouting for years without truly addressing the questions posed to them (i.e. I know nothing about your background but since you don't agree with me you must not have a clue). I've had any number of profs after initially looking at a lab result claim that it was not possible only to turn around two days later and admit they were wrong. To their credit they got that far and that is what science is about, creating a hypothesis, testing it, retesting it then putting it out there for the scientific community to test and confirm. When you start going down the road of Cosmic Background Radiation, Big Bang and other theories in Astronomy/Cosmology you remove the ability for reproducable testing to occur. You also open the door for people to interject with numerous whacked out ideas that have no basis in reality but people can't prove them wrong. When you purport to know the age of the universe but don't know exactly how our solar system formed you put yourself out on the edge of unreliable resource.
To just respond further to your flaming, no where in your response do you do anything but make the erroneous assumption that i'm uneducated. Problem being i'm extremely educated but in a branch of science that tests its theories as opposed to making crutches (read "dark matter", "dark energy") to prop them up. Have fun changing the age of the universe in 10 years time, by then we should've solved cancer by doing real science.