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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.
Death Star
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
...it wasn't Dick Cheney?
Am I the only one thinking "KAAAAHHHHNNNNNN!!!!!!"?
OMG! They're making room for a hyperpace-bypass!
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.
Has anyone heard anything about the Four brave cosmonauts that were up there studying this?
Early reports mention that one is now invisible, another turned to stone, one can now stretch, and the cocky one can set himself on fire.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
That's right: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, not even information. We are witnessing something that happened millions of years ago, but because the electromagnetic waves (light, gamma rays etc) carrying the information are all travelling at the same speed (the speed of light), we get a chronological "look" at how the event panned out millions of years ago.
In actual fact, when you look at, say, a chair, you're actually seeing the chair as it was several (nano/pico/something, not sure of the exact time interval) seconds ago (a very small time period).
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
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?
Just prior the explosion was heard:
"Hey, Billy-Joe! Watch THIS!"
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.
I believe the light travels about 12 inches in a nanosecond.
Google agrees.
It makes you realize just how fast multi-Gigahertz processors are, doesn't it? Look over at your computer - by the time the light from it reaches your eyes, it's probably already working on it's next instruction.