Slashdot Mirror
NASA Detects Nearby Mystery Explosion
starexplorer2001 writes "Space.com is reporting that NASA has detected a 'totally new' mystery explosion near our galaxy." From the article: "The event, detected Feb. 18, looks something like a gamma-ray burst (GRB), scientists said. But it is much closer--about 440 million light-years away--than others. And it lasted about 33 minutes. Most GRBs are billions of light-years away and last less than a second or just a few seconds."
2,586,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away is 'nearby' ?!
www.sjbaker.org
sorry, that was me, I had tacobell for lunch.
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
Or does this just show how little we understnd the universe
Doesn't anyone read SciFi anymore? It's the Omega clouds! And when they get here, they'll wipe out every square corner on Earth! Run for the hills! :-P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Death Star
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
...it wasn't Dick Cheney?
Am I the only one thinking "KAAAAHHHHNNNNNN!!!!!!"?
Has anyone heard anything about the Four brave cosmonauts that were up there studying this?
swanker than you
OMG! They're making room for a hyperpace-bypass!
Mystery Explosion... am I the only one who thinks this is an awesome name for a crappy glam band?
Their first album would need to be called something like Galactic Sorcery, Gems of Alchemy, or Bells of Illusion.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
I wonder if the alien's version of "I nuke you if you nuke me" is "I blow up your star if you blow up my star"....
Maybe one of them blinked first.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
And, somewhere in the UP, between Watersmeet and Marquette a billboard has silently been erected along US2 that reads:
"Mystery Explosion" only 440 million light-years away. Take exit Alpha Gamma 12, Just past Blorgon 7.
If this makes no sense to you, then you have never lived or spent any significant amount of time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. You poor, poor troll. Go home and kiss your children.
Does this mean the event happened 440 million years ago and we're just now detecting it because information about it has finally arrived? The physics of spacetime have always puzzled me.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Pffft! We gonglorians at digg.magellanclouds.com.et had this story posted 440 million years ago!
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
This is Brigadier Kerla speaking for the High Command. There has been an incident on Praxis. However, everything is under control, we have no need for assistance. Obey treaty stipulations and remain outside the Neutral Zone. This transmission ends now.
But what if I'm on the freeway during rush hour?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I saw this on Atlantis last year...how 2005.
It's the Vogon Constructor Fleet clearig a way for the new bypass. We're next!
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
why do i fear the price of oil rising and somehow having it linked to this... //magic eight balls do not report gamma ray bursts
<end/>
(yes, yes, speed of light, 440 million years ago, whatever)
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Double 'a', actually.
It was that working warp engine that these guys are working on.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Actually, that explosion was the result of all the computers on the planet Bleepgorp exploding shortly after their illegal downloads of season 1 of American Idol through the delta quadrant wormhole.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Ignoring all the silly posts above, this is facsinating. It's nice to know there's still mystery in the universe, and the prospect of seeing a supernova unfold is very exciting. I'm not sure, but I believe a supernova would outshine any other stars in the sky, even from that distance (although this may only be stars within out galaxy). Either way, it will let us get valuable information on the hardest part of a star's life to observe: their death.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> That was Alderaan blowing up.
I suppose that means we were in line with the explosive ring on it. And if there isn't one, there soon will be.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm looking for a Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator, if only that dastardly Duck Dodgers doesn't get in the way.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Hey, Rag-Tag Fugitive Fleet, we're over here!
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Ignoring all the silly posts above, this is a fascinating event. It's nice to know there's still mystery in the universe, and the prospect of seeing a supernova unfold is very exciting. I'm not sure, but I believe a supernova would outshine any other stars in the sky, even from that distance (although this may only be stars within out galaxy). Either way, it will let us get valuable information on the hardest part of a star's life to observe: their death.
FEMA has announced they will be responding to this new threat to national security. How many light years is an adaquate response time for them ?
Looks like someone is using Weapons of Mass Destruction in a far away galaxy! We must stop them!
Lets get that space program ramped up to save the galaxy!
"Thank you, professor. We now take you to Grover's Mill, New Jersey, where one of the mysterious objects has landed."
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Sometimes a supernova can be viewed. There are reports during the time of old kingdom and such of Egypt that Super Nova were observed... But the stars were within our own galaxy. 440 million light years is well outside our galaxy. Although it would be nifty to see a Super Nova in the night skies. Maybe a decent sized telescope like the Kek Twins on Maunea Kea on the island of Hawaii will get some good pictures :)
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
That started as a joke, but now I really want to know: Why DO we care?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
If you wanted to get someone's attention in the universe... a GRB that lasts for a long time would be a great way to do it. Not that I am saying it was aliens or anything.... heheheh
... is just the final implosion of the Star Trek franchise.
that was my mother's birthday candle
I've heard of these in the historic past that got real bright - even visible during the day. That would be cool!
Are you sure they weren't talking about the bright lamp in the big roofless room? I've heard that it's sometimes visible during the day as well, but that it's hot rather than cool...
Aren't the Vorlons supposed to be busy about now? Or am I late?
kulakovich
Obviously they get compressed together over a long journey. Has anyone considered this?
Remember, no one knows as much as they think they do. When you do, the Universe keeps proving you wrong.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Perhaps it will turn out to be a normal GRB. As it is so much closer than normal we get to detect fainter effects than we would normally notice?
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
Let me demonstrate the POWER of a fully operational DEATH STAR!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
i think the most interesting question to answer is not "what" it was, but if it's actually a natural phenomenon at all. I'm pretty sure most of you know the various estimates of the number of advanced civilisations in the universe.......... i seriously think that astronomers should at least look at the possibility, that not all stellar observations have a "natural" origin - a civilisation near our solar system may even think of our sun as a source of strange natural radio waves...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So they say *most* are billions of light years away and happen for just seconds. Have they ever thought perhaps their measurements of space/time are not correct, and while those other bursts they've seen may really be billions of light years away, they could actually be happening for hours? If nothing else, I would be more interested in the previous findings and how space time may actually behave differently over greater distances than previously thought. IANAS though, so perhaps it's just the wandering mind of an infantile over here.
IAU Circular 8674, which states in part
There is a good deal of news in the GRBLog:
http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php
Just search for "GRB 060218".
It appears to be a Type Ib/c supernova -- meaning a massive star, which has lost most of its hydrogen envelope, running out of fuel in its core and exploding -- in a relatively nearby galaxy. By "nearby", I mean "at a redshift of z=0.033", which is still much farther away than the Virgo or Coma clusters of galaxies.
It is currently around magnitude 18, and may brighten by a magnitude or so, but will still require a pretty big telescope and sensitive camera to detect.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Obi-Wan: It's as if a million voices all cried out in terror - and were suddenly silenced.
Luke: I knew I shouldn't have had the extra beans on that jawa burrito.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Let that be a lesson to any other alien races that draw a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad!
The Zentradi are coming.
That creature has stolen the space modulator...
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Supernova explosion with 33-minute GRB display and loud report. Light and get away.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Whew! That was close...
Obviously, it was a malfunctioning StarDrive, a magnetic containment breach, which allowed the escape of Gamma particles for approximately 33 minutes, until the engineering crew was able to get the containment field to stabililze and stop the leak.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Well, I guess we found Saddam's WMD's ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Keck and the other scopes on Mauna Kea will, though, sometimes try to sneak a peek at a "high-priority" target like this, if they can find the time in their busy schedules.
Oh, along with Rochester Astronomy, a couple other cool sources for announcements of newly found supernovae and such are the IAU Circulars (subscription required) and Astronomer's Telegram. For gamma ray bursts, check out NASA's Gamma ray bursts Coordinates Network, too.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Damn! I missed my opportunity to get bathed in Gamma radiation!
Well, green is probably a bad color for me.
Can I presume that this signals the Second Coming or should I feel free to book my flight to the Bahamas now?
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
It's space commies, coming to steal our water!
Just prior the explosion was heard:
"Hey, Billy-Joe! Watch THIS!"
Let me get this straight: A half-billion years ago, outside our galaxy, for half an hour, there was some unusual gamma radiation.
Yep, NASA detects Nearby Mystery Explosion certainly didn't pique my interest for what turns out to be of only vague academic value. No, sir!
XeoMage
According to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which, IIRC, is the most recent measuring of the Hubble Constant, the value for the Hubble Constant is 71 ± 4 km/s/Mpc. This would give the universe an age of 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years.
Other findings of WMAP include the makeup of the universe as 4% matter, 23% dark matter, and 73% dark energy, and a flat geometry for the universe.
Best estimates for the age of our solar system are currently about 4.6 billion years. Life ostensibly started very quickly, on a cosmological timeline. IIRC, earliest evidence of life points to around 3.5 billion years ago.
But your point about it being a lot more recent on a cosmological scale are correct.
Good!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hmm.. maybe I won't put my Matrix of Leadership on eBay just yet...
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that saying: "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades?"
Well close only counts with black holes, neutron stars, and galactic explosions.
I mean if a neutron star passed within a hundred million miles of us, we'd be f**ked.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
From TFA:"This could be a new kind of burst, or we might be seeing a gamma-ray burst from an entirely different angle," said Swift scientist John Nousek at Penn State University.
Hey, maybe Lucas was onto something when he "retouched" the trilogy.
You forgot "Hold my beer!" :)
... For Great Justice!
The plans for the Vogon's Hyperspace Bypass have finally been approved. Demolition begins this week. They've been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.
It's meaningless in imperial measurements. That'll be around 4,162,632,500,000,000,000,000 km. ;P Near? :D
The Milky Way is around 946,052,840,000,000,000 km in diameter (our galaxy galaxy, not the candy bar, though I wish).
That's 4,400 times the diameter of the galaxy
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
"It comes in pints?!" :)
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Now, IANAP, but I believe the deal with Cherenkov radiation is that it occurs when a charged particle (such as an electron) exceeds the speed of light in a medium. Since the propogation speed of light changes based on the medium through which it travels, in some media, this can be accomplished. The denser the material, the slower light propagates through it. Water is something like 0.75c. Diamond, I believe, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.4c. See Refractive Index for more information.
The general idea is that nothing can exceed c, the speed of light in a perfect vacuum. Which, if I'm not incorrect, is what ChowRiit was referring to when s/he said "That's right: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information."
Yeah yeah yeah.. so when do i become the incredible hulk from the gamma rays?
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
Lets calculate how much anti-matter would have to be distributed for such a long gamma ray burst.
What is that number for dial an astrophysicist?
Damn, I keep losing that number.
Chirp in with your guess as to how much anti-matter lasts for 30 light minutes of explosion?
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
I'm glad that the 'totally new' was in quotes to clue me into the fact that this was introducing a new definition of the phrase: only half a billion years old. :-)
I hope so, because a stunning lack of
basic facts of cosmology comes through
in most of the posts above.
At least google some astrophysics, people.
And yes, that is nearby, in intergalactic
terms.
Space is big. really, really big!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
like the minds of millions of /.ers have ceased to exist.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
WMDs?
My bicyles
Until we discovered that gamma ray bursts are not uniformly distributed, they appeared to defy E=MC^2; were they to radiate uniformly, E=MC^2 would suggest impossibly massive sources. Instead, as we understand them right now, they radiate much like a spotlight and cannot be directly measured beyond the penumbra
;)
This article suggests that this gamma ray burst may simply be from a different angle than the continuous bombardments of gamma ray bursts that we have been studying since the beginning of the cold war. 50 years is incomprehensibly short on a cosmic scale, this may well be the first time that we have measured a GRB from this vantage.
In any case, it should prove interesting to observe the afterglow -- it is certainly easy to spot
The event, detected Feb. 18, looks something like a gamma-ray burst (GRB), scientists said. But it is much closer--about 440 million light-years away--than others.
Wasn't there a series of Charles Sheffield novels where Alpha-Centuauri explodes and blasts the earth with gamma rays? Of coure AC isn't an exploding type star, and what are the odds that it would be pointing right at us if it did. One must suspect foul play...
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
This is not strictly true. Light simply thinks that it's the fastest thing going. The truth of the matter is that dark is faster than light, for no matter how fast light goes, it gets there just to discover that dark was there first.
So if you were far enough from Earth, but could use a "Super Strong(tm)" telescope to see the Earth, it would show you Earth's past!
Sweet! Just like that Star Trek TOS episode... Squire of Gothos.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Considering we are now beginning to detect planets around other stars (admittedly big ones), there's no telling what other phenomena we will find associated with stars as look harder at them. Perhaps if two intelligent, space-faring species were at war, explosions from weapons detonations, especially if they involved the use of nuclear fusion or anti-matter/matter annihilation, might certainly be detectable. Again there's the the problem of we'd being seeing these things long after they originally occurred, but it would certainly mean there were lifeforms elsewhere, though then the question would be, have they moved their fight in our direction over the eons?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
And explosion like this isn't just going to affect a few planets in a solar system, it's going to flash fry every system for hundreds or thousands of light years in every direction. Kinda the interstellar version of the hydrogen bomb.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Is the relevant speed of light you're looking for.
So an image of light reflecting off an object 9 feet away is 12 nanoseconds old.
Stargate (okay, maybe one word). The event lasted about 33 minutes. Maybe someone used a gatebuster on it to close it before the 38 minutes were up?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Now we know that "a long time ago" was 440 million years ago and "far, far away" means 440 million light years away.
First intelligent signal from space:
"Hello, I am sending you this request hoping it reaches you by yesterday. Please point your telescopes toward my homeworld at {coordinates supplied}. Then zoom in Here {link to otherplanets.maps.google.com}. Watch the house behind the Starbuck's and tell me where I left my car keys. Thank you!"
... it had lasted 42 minutes.
This sig is false.
"But it is much closer--about 440 million light-years away--...Most GRBs are billions of light-years away..." ...BUT ITS GETTING ALOT CLOSER!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
This intergalatic explosion is evidence of Xenu, the evil overlord who imprisoned the Thetans on Earth. Yes, oh doubters of L. Ron Hubbard, now you can see that The Great One was right all along. What astronomers are seeing now are the remnants of the war that took place long ago, before the great spaceships came to earth using their wonderous intergalatic star drives. Before the Thetans were sent here.
I'd write more, but it's time to take my pills. The voice of L. Ron in my head is making it difficult to concentrate.
Remember the destruction of both Death Stars took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. This was a nearby/recent event.
I'm planning to nip over there to take a look. Once my starship is up to its cruising speed of 99.999% of c, the event will only be a million years ago.
It is not such old news after all
Makes me think about the Larry Niven short story "Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex" that speculates on what would happen if Superman were to get it on. The phrase "would gut her like a trout, then blow her brains through the top of her head" comes to mind.
And if he *did* manage to get a woman pregnant without killing her, once the baby starts kicking . . .
...strange Deathstar-like plannet seen lurking nearby.
*whew*!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
"Hello, I am sending you this request hoping it reaches you by yesterday..."
I almost thought it would continue with "I am a member of the Royal Family of the planet XMorb and I have in my posession(sp?) a large amount of money I have to transfer to another planet..."
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
2,896 trillion pints.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
but it would certainly mean there were lifeforms elsewhere
Gauged on that blast, the're not there anymore.
Still mysteries in the 'verse? Are you kidding? You are like a first grader, first day at school "I'm sure glad there is more to learn after kindergarten".
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
I never even read about this visible Supernova. I knew I mispelled the Keck Twins too lol. When I was in Hawaii in November the people who work the telescopes told me that they have VERY busy schedules, you are right. Sometimes educational/research institutions pay $25,000 just for one night. If you are interested you can see a picture I took of the keck telescopes at: http://www.ussamazon.com/live/hawaii/telescopes.JP G Yeah upper case JPG, server I use for that site is case sensative. But thanks for the awesome info!
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
He'll have to fly her to a red sun (or whatever colour he loses his powers) or to live in a dark room for the term.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Yup, that's Kecks on the left, NASA IRTF on the right.
:) After all, they're spending $40,000 a month on air conditioning alone...
$25,000 of funding might leave you a bit short of a night of Keck time, though, depending on what time of year. The general rule of thumb there is to figure $1 per second.
By way of comparison, the U. of Hawaii 2.2-meter scope costs maybe $2,500 a night to run.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.