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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."
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 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
sig?
For a homework problem, I have my astronomy students calculate how bright the Galactic core would be if it were a quasar and there wasn't any obscuring dust in the plane of the galaxy. It turns out to be about the brightness of the full moon, but since it would be smaller, it would be more striking. That's at a distance of 8 kpc or so.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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)